The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann

On 3 May 2007, three-year-old Madeleine McCann disappeared from a ground-floor apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, while her parents Kate and Gerry McCann were dining with friends at a nearby tapas restaurant, checking on their three sleeping children at intervals through the evening. When Kate returned to check on the children around 10pm, Madeleine was gone. There was no sign of forced entry. The disappearance triggered one of the largest and most heavily reported missing-person investigations in modern history.

Portuguese police's early investigation was widely criticised, and for a period Kate and Gerry McCann were formally named "arguidos" — official suspects under Portuguese law — before being cleared in 2008. The case went cold for over a decade, revisited periodically through renewed appeals, tip-offs, and unsuccessful searches, including a major joint UK-German-Portuguese excavation of the Arade Dam reservoir in May 2023 that found no evidence connected to Madeleine.

In 2020, German prosecutors named a new suspect: Christian Brückner, a convicted sex offender who was living in the Algarve region at the time of Madeleine's disappearance and whose phone had reportedly pinged a nearby cell tower on the night she vanished. Brückner has never been charged in relation to Madeleine's case and denies involvement. He was released from a German prison on 17 September 2025 after completing a separate seven-year sentence for the 2005 rape of an American woman in Portugal, fitted with an electronic monitoring tag. As of mid-2026, British investigators are reported to be working toward building a case that could see Brückner formally charged over Madeleine's disappearance. She has never been found.