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Madeleine Beth McCann (born 12 May 2003) disappeared on the evening of Thursday, 3 May 2007, from her bed in an apartment in Praia da Luz, a resort in the Algarve region of Portugal. She was on holiday there from the UK with her parents, twin siblings and a group of family friends and their children. The disappearance became what the Daily Telegraph called "the most heavily reported missing-person case in modern history." Her whereabouts remain unknown.[4]

Madeleine and her younger siblings had reportedly been left asleep at 20:30 in the ground-floor apartment while her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, dined with their travelling companions in a restaurant 50 metres (160 ft) away.[5] The parents checked on the children throughout the evening until Madeleine's mother reportedly discovered she was missing at 22:00. The Portuguese police seemed at first to accept that it was an abduction, but after misinterpreting a British DNA analysis came to believe that she had died in the apartment, which placed a cloud of suspicion over her parents.[6] The McCanns were declared arguidos (suspects) in September 2007, but were cleared in July 2008 when Portugal's attorney-general closed the case.[7]

The parents continued the investigation using private detectives, but after the intervention of the British Home Secretary in May 2011 Scotland Yard set up a new inquiry, Operation Grange. The Portuguese police reopened their own investigation in October 2013, though there appeared to be little collaboration between the police forces.[8] That month Scotland Yard released e-fit images of men they wanted to trace, including one of a man seen carrying a child toward the beach that night.[9]

The disappearance attracted sustained international interest and in the UK saturation coverage reminiscent of the death of Diana in 1997. The McCanns were subjected to intense scrutiny and allegations of involvement in their daughter's death, particularly in the tabloid press and on Twitter, which was just a year old when Madeleine went missing.[10] They were awarded damages in 2008 against the Express Group and front-page apologies from the group's newspapers.[11] In 2011 they testified before the Leveson Inquiry into British press misconduct, lending support to those arguing for tighter press regulation in the UK.[12]Madeleine was born in Leicester and lived with her parents and siblings in Rothley, also in Leicestershire. On the advice of the International Family Law Group in London, which flew staff to Portugal to advise the McCanns, she was made a ward of court in England in the summer of 2007. This gives the court statutory powers to act on her behalf, such as applying for access to certain records.[13]

Interpol described Madeleine as having straight blonde hair, blue-green eyes, a small brown mark on the calf of her left leg, and a distinctive dark strip on the iris of her right eye, possibly a coloboma.[14] Against the advice of the Portuguese police, who feared that emphasizing her eye would place her in more danger, close-up shots of her iris appeared in shop windows around Europe, and posters highlighting the word "look" were designed with the first "o" containing the mark.[15] The McCanns released several age-progressed images in 2009 of how Madeleine may have looked at age six – the first was released during an interview with the McCanns by Oprah Winfrey – and Scotland Yard released another in 2012 of her at age nine.[16]The McCanns arrived in Praia da Luz on 28 April 2007 and stayed at 5A Rua Dr Agostinho da Silva, which they had booked for a seven-night break through the British holiday company Mark Warner Ltd. 5A was a two-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of the fifth block of a group of apartments known as Waterside Village. The block lay on the perimeter of Mark Warner's Ocean Club resort and overlooked its pool, tennis courts, tapas restaurant and bar. Many of the privately owned apartments were rented by Mark Warner for its guests; the McCanns' apartment was owned by a retired teacher from Liverpool.[22]

Located on the corner of Rua Dr Agostinho da Silva and Rua Dr Francisco Gentil Martins, 5A was accessible to the public from all sides.[23] Sliding patio doors at the back faced the Ocean Club; the patio doors could be accessed from a short set of steps and a gate on the side of the block leading from Rua Dr Francisco Gentil Martins.[24] The front door of the apartment was situated on Rua Dr Agostinho da Silva, the non-resort side of the block, and led to a walled car park and the street. The three children slept in a bedroom next to the front door. The room had one waist-high window with an exterior shutter, which looked onto a narrow walkway that was separated from the car park by a low wall.[25] The twins slept in travel cots in the middle of the room, while Madeleine was in a single bed on the opposite side of the room from the window.[26]Thursday, 3 May, was the penultimate day of the family's holiday. The children spent the morning in the resort's Kids' Club while the parents went for a walk, then the family lunched together at their apartment before heading to the pool.[26] Madeleine's mother took the last known photograph of Madeleine by the pool that afternoon, sitting next to her father and two-year-old sister.[27] The children returned to Kids' Club, and at 18:00 their mother took them back to the apartment while their father went for a tennis lesson.[26] The McCanns put the children to bed around 19:00. Madeleine was left asleep in the single bed next to her pink comfort blanket and a pink soft toy, Cuddle Cat. She was wearing a pair of short-sleeved, pink-and-white Marks and Spencer's Eeyore pyjamas.[28]

The parents left the apartment at 20:30 to dine with their friends in the Ocean Club's open-air tapas restaurant, 50 metres (160 ft) as the crow flies on the other side of the pool, a walk of 30–45 seconds, according to Madeleine's mother.[29] The staff at the tapas restaurant had left a note in a staff message book asking that the same table, which overlooked the apartments, be block-booked for 20:30 for the McCanns and their friends for several evenings during their holiday. The message said the group's children were asleep in the apartments, and the staff book was left at the swimming-pool reception area. Madeleine's mother believes that the abductor may have seen the note.[30]

The McCanns and their friends left the table throughout the evening to check on their children. The McCanns' patio doors could only be locked from the inside, so they had left them closed but unlocked to allow them to enter that way.[31] Madeleine's father carried out the first check on 5A at around 21:05. All was well, except that he recalled having left the children's bedroom door only slightly ajar and now it stood almost wide open; he said he pulled it back to a five-degree position before returning to the restaurant.[32]