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.

Police search for missing toddler

Police in Portugal are investigating claims a three-year-old girl from Leicester has been abducted while on holiday with her family.
Madeline McCann's parents were having dinner at a restaurant close to the Mark Warner Ocean Summer Club near the village of Praia da Luz in the Algarve.

Kate and Gerry McCann returned at about 2145 GMT to find an empty bed and the apartment door and window wide open.

The apartment has been cordoned off and local people are helping with a search.

The British Embassy confirmed it had been informed about the toddler's disappearence.

A friend of the family told BBC News that the McCanns were having dinner a few hundred yards away from the apartment and had been checking on the children every half hour.

The family was on holiday with a group of nine adults and eight children.

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People do things on holiday they probably would n't do at home and MW offer the "reassurance" of a babylistening service. How that might operate in this Club I'm not sure because iirc I don't think it is a typical MW complex., Accommodation isn't all in one place, but among a much larger public complex, and the "club" seems very spread out. Remember that companies like this like to encourage eating in the evenings without the younger children present. I agree there may well be circumstances which are not being made public but it does seem a very random incident

That is from BBC NEWS website

According to sky news there were 3 under 5's in the room so I wonder why only the 3 year old is gone? So very sad

Quote from Mark Warner: ?We are all hoping that she is asleep under a bush somewhere and we will find her soon.?
I hope so too.

JodieG1 - I would imagine that most people who abduct children would normally only take one child, not all of them.

But to me this doesn?t seem like a random incident. If she was abducted, the abductor would have had to know that there were children alone in the apartment, that the parents weren?t there and when they were coming/going to check on the children. Too many factors involved to just randomly go and break into a room and abduct a child.

Message withdrawn

Hulababy I thought that too but not when there was a room with 3 children in. Just seemed odd to me that's all. I hope she's just wandered off somewhere too.

Quotes from hotel manager:

He said there was no physical evidence that the girl had been abducted from the family?s rented apartment while they ate at the tapas restaurant 200 yards away.
?It?s still questionable as to whether it?s an abduction,? he said.

I guess he would say that though as he doesn't want any bad publicity for the hotel.

are both the parents the girl's biological parents? could this be an absent parent who doesn't have access who has followed the family on holiday and has taken advantage of the fact they may have been more relaxed while on holiday?

In some american states I've heard they use a statewide news alert when a child goes missing which has had some success, do they have anything like this in Portugal do you think?

My parents live in Lanzarote, they told me a stry of child abduction there a few years back, a toddler blonde english boy vanished while with his parents in a shopping mall, the security guards were fantastic and immediately shut all entrances to the shoping mall while they seached for him, they found him with a german couple in the toilets dying his hair, it sent shivers down my spine.

I so hope this little one is found.

No physical evidence? I thought there were reports of a broken shutter and the door and window being open.

Brings back memories of the little boy Ben, who went missing in Greece.

I just hope the ending is happier.

that may not actually be what happened though hb. if it was reported on sky/ITV, it's possible that report has just come in from a member of the public, ie friend of a friend of someone who was on holiday there, and ITV/sky don't always check out their sources before reporting iyswim. eg on the day of the 7/7 bombings, sky were reporting that 5 busses had been blown up and that several suspected suecide bombers had been shot in canary warf.

totaleclipse - gave me goosebumps reading that.

Thats terrible totaleclipse - thank god for the quick thinking of the security guards.
I have been thining about Ben Needham - he was never found and they thought it may have been gypsies who took him . Cant remember how he was snatched.

It's called an Amber alert in the Us isn't it?

saw it on csi

What surprised me on gmtv was that the friend didn't know how long they had been on holiday or when they went

There are quite a few versions of that story, though, Totaleclipse. I think your parents may have fallen for an urban myth.

Maximum horror for anyone it happens to, but child abduction is very rare.

Wait for the story to unfold.

In most child abduction cases, the abductor is a parent.

totaleclipse

True. I do find that the non BBC sites tend to report things too fast, and then have to backtrack when things are not true.

mommajools - I think he was playing outside the holiday villa when he was taken. Thee have been several false (or suspected) sightings of him, but he has never been found.