New Video Image Out in Search for McCann

(Nov. 3) -- British police have released a new video with computer images of what missing girl Madeleine McCann might look like now, at age 6. It's been more than two years since she disappeared on a family vacation in Portugal, in a case that gained international attention.

"The person we are looking to reach is likely to be a partner, family member, friend or colleague of the person or people who were involved in Madeleine's disappearance," said Jim Gamble, head of the U.K.'s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, according to a press release.


Police and the McCanns are making a new push to find the girl, who disappeared days before her fourth birthday in May 2007. The new effort comes in the wake of the Jaycee Dugard case in California. Dugard was found in August after being kidnapped in 1991.

Gerry McCann, Madeleine's father, told the BBC on Tuesday that the video is an attempt to contact specific people instead of a wide appeal for information.

"We need it to be spread far and wide, and for those people to be exposed to this message as many times as possible," he said.

Madeleine's parents said they were having dinner at a restaurant just outside their apartment at a resort in Portugal on May 3, 2007, while the little girl and her two younger siblings slept inside. When they checked on the children, Madeleine was gone.
The case made international headlines as her parents, Gerry and Kate McCann, appealed to the public for help. Portuguese police named the McCanns, who are both doctors from central England, suspects in their daughter's disappearance, but they were never charged.

Portuguese police closed the case in July 2008, clearing the McCanns.

This isn't the first time a computer-generated of Madeleine has been released. The McCanns also released an image on May 1, two years after her disappearance.

The new video message is available in seven languages and is supported by Interpol, an international police agency that reaches 187 countries.

Two worldwide appeals from Interpol in recent years made headlines when the international police agency released photos of suspected pedophiles, asking for the public's help in identifying each man.

In one case, the agency famously "unswirled" a doctored photo to reveal the face of a man who was identified as Christopher Paul Neil, a Canadian schoolteacher who was arrested in 2007 for sex crimes. Neil is currently serving more than a three-year sentence in a Thai prison. The other case led to the 2008 arrest of Wayne Nelson Corliss, an actor who pleaded guilty to crimes involving having sex with boys in Thailand.