Shortly after this, Portuguese police reopened their inquiry. In 2013, Scotland Yard released e-fit images of men they wanted to trace, including one of a man seen carrying a child toward the beach on the night Madeleine vanished. The senior investigating officer announced that he was treating the disappearance as 'a criminal act by a stranger', most likely a planned abduction or burglary gone wrong. Madeleine's parents continued the investigation using private detectives until Scotland Yard opened its own inquiry, Operation Grange, in 2011. The McCanns were given arguido (suspect) status in September 2007, which was lifted when Portugal's attorney general archived the case in July 2008 for lack of evidence. Over the following weeks, particularly after misinterpreting a British DNA analysis, the Portuguese police came to believe that Madeleine had died in an accident in the apartment and her parents had covered it up. The parents checked on the children throughout the evening, until Kate discovered Madeleine was missing at 22:00. The McCann children had been left asleep at 20:30 in the ground-floor apartment while their parents dined with friends in a restaurant 55 metres (180 ft) away.

Madeleine was on holiday from the United Kingdom with her parents Kate and Gerry McCann, her two-year-old twin siblings, and a group of family friends and their children.

Madeleine's whereabouts remain unknown, although German prosecutors believe she is dead. The Daily Telegraph described the disappearance as 'the most heavily reported missing-person case in modern history'. Madeleine Beth McCann (born ) is a British missing person who disappeared from her bed in a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal on the evening of, at the age of 3.

The night she disappeared book summary