Costa News Spain Breaking News | English News in Spain.
By Jon Clarke in Praia da Luz
The first pictures of police at the site of the initial search for Madeleine McCann, who has been missing in Portugal since the summer of 2010, are shown below.
Olive Press took these photos on the Algarve yesterday, showing the nerve centre of the four-day inquiry as well an additional Portuguese support tent.
Around 3pm, the police sealed off an area of 50 hectares and a number of dirt roads between Praia da Luz where Maddie was last seen in 2007 and Lagos.
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The police teams arrived in white rental cars and unmarked vans, while the bosses arrived on black Range Rovers.
The locality of Ataleia is the first place to search, as this is where German suspect Christian Brueckner spent a lot of time.
In addition to working at Boavista’s golf club, he commuted each day to bars and restaurants located in Lagos.
Around three kilometres away from Praia da Luz are scattered farms and ruins.
Portuguese police – who are working under the German BKA – confirmed they had registered a total of 21 separate properties to search between June 2 and 6.
READ MORE: EXCLUSIVE: As the trial of Maddie suspect Christian Brueckner re-starts – and she would have been 21 this month – JON CLARKE traces his suspicious movements through Spain and Portugal in May 2007
At 7.00am, dedicated search teams arrived to start scouring the region.
Olive Press revealed that: “It will be a fantastic show.”
The area is littered with ruins, wells and cisterns. These are all good places to conceal a body.
“It is a desert and who knows what you might find.”
The BKA headquarters in Wiesbaden received a tip-off about the search after they began investigating Brueckner’s crime since 2018.
German authorities confirmed that they had requested the search of the area.
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The Olive Press has been informed that they have requested numerous additional searches in Portugal, but this request was not granted.
In the last two years, up to 100 officers and divers participated in a search at the lake inland of Arade.
Police focussed on a lake camp where Brueckner regularly spent time to ‘cleanse himself’.
He called it his ‘paradise’ when he was looking to be alone.
While detectives found various fragments of material they were ‘too degraded’ to be able to offer any DNA link to missing Madeleine.
