OMG. Anybody just seen GMTV? 3 yr old girl abducted on holiday on the Algarve.

[tiredemma]

kate said reports just in, cant find anything on bbc.

bloody awful.

I feel the same as Aloha. The fact that she is pretty should be irrelevant but the fact that it is constantly mentioned is very disturbing.
She was in my thoughts all last night and the first thing I did this morning was to check the news hoping she had been found.
My dd1 (4) wasn't very well last night and I took the opportunity to get into bed with her and hold her tight and smell her hair.
I can't imagine how Maddie's parents are feeling.

agree Aloha. Very odd and rather distasteful.

handle me carefully it does happen just not often, I don't understand how people who don't leave children on their own at home do so on holiday although I guess because itwas afamily based resort adn they weere so close it was decision made based on risk assessment that should be ok.
I hope she is found soon and her parents reconcile their decision with themselves

i've found that rather creepy too, aloha. blonde, yes, but where's the relevance of the prettiness or otherwise?

it is creepy and I have asked myself if she was dark or less pretty or black or mixed race or if her parents weren't professionals would the media be so interested in pursuing the story

look at the society we live in, obsessed by what we look like. A pretty blond child is newsworthy -

see, to me it strongly implies that they wish to pursue the more sensationalist angle that she's been abducted by a paedophile but in the absence of any actual evidence they'll just push the 'she's so pretty, er, why wouldn't someone abduct her' line. or am i just looking too deeply into it?

aitch I think you are right -

agree aitch it makes the story much more sensatinalist

A bbc reporter said earlier that the police abroad don?t report on cases like this in the same way the police here do so as not to jeopardise any future case against a potential suspect. In this country it almost goes too far the other way with suspects being named before they?ve even been charged with a crime and then being hung drawn and quartered by the media and the public at large thus ensuring they can never really have a fair trial.

But they were talking to the editor of one of the local papers this morning, and he said that both the hotel management and the police had stated categorically that there had been no forced entry into the apartment, and that reports of the shutters having been forced were untrue. He also said that police don?t appear to believe this was an abduction and that abduction is unheard of in Portugal, so if it was an abduction, that it was unlikely the guilty party would be Portuguese.

I couldn't stop thinking about this girl last night. I am at my sister's and I collected my 3yo dd from her cousin's room and cuddled her in with me last night. How sad that there's still no news.

I'm not sure I'd buy the line that it would never happen in Portugal or be a local - there are crime and dubious characters all over ! Let's face it this is hardly going to be good for local tourism.

yes, that rather reminds me (admittedly glibly) of the mayor in jaws... no sharks here...

I awoke this morning hoping there would be good news and turned on the computer & TV straight away for news. Very, very sad that there is nothing good to hear.

The more I think about it, the more I question the whole 'broke into the room and abducted her' theory.

In a country where abductions are rare, an abductor would have had to know she was in the room, knowing there was no baby listening service, and knowing the parents would check every half hour. So the abductor would have to loiter until after a parental check before striking.
And there are no signs of forceful entry.

Too implausible.

However, did the room/appartment not back onto a road, and the resort was not enclosed.
What if she woke up, went looking for her parents (somebody already said the locks on the doors were easy to open from the inside), but instead wandered onto the road where a passing vehicle (with an opportunistic b*stard inside) took her.

Acually, typing that, it seems implausible too.

Oh heck, Madeleine where are you?

Those poor parents, they must be out of their minds and beyond...

parents say the shutters were broken into.

No, was that later not denied - the police confirmed there was nothing wrong with the shutters.

yes it seems there is a disagreement about the shutters?

The whole Ben Needham thing sounds implausable too, but it happend. I've never been able to get that out of my mind. I've no idea how his mother was able to move on with her life.

'Trish said: "The door was lying open, the window in the bedroom and the shutters had been jemmied open.'

But police and Mark Warner deny this

Ah, that makes sense hatrick.

I guess it's possible that the mum could have gone to check, discovered she was missing, and run to the window and opened the window and shutters to see if she could see anything, but in the panic, not remembering doing so, so when the family returned they found the window open but the mum didn't recall opening it because she was so stressed/panicked.