Maddie officers to ask for more cash as search funds run out
SCOTLAND Yard pledged to continue the hunt for Madeleine McCann last night as it prepared to ask for more cash.
Sources said that there were no plans for the investigation to be shelved, even though funding is due to run out in weeks.
The force continues to probe a line of inquiry into the three-year-old’s disappearance from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in May 2007.
Officers on the vastly scaled down inquiry have made several trips to the Algarve under a shroud of secrecy.
This week it was reported that Madeleine’s parents, Kate and Glasgow-born Gerry, of Rothley, Leicestershire, feared the inquiry could be shelved.
A source close to the couple said: ‘They have been here before. They simply have no idea if the search will abruptly come to an end or will carry on. It is a daunting prospect they face once more.’
But the Met Police said it was asking the Home Office for funding. The force has spent more than £11million on the investigation since it was launched in May 2011.
A Home Office spokesman said any further request for special grant funding would be ‘carefully considered’.
In March, the probe into Madeleine’s suspected abduction was granted a further £150,000 in funding.
Officers have sifted 40,000 documents produced by Portuguese police, who conducted the initial investigation.
They also examined reams of evidence that had been amassed by the eight teams of private detectives who have worked on the case.
Some 600 ‘persons of interest’ have been examined and far flung ‘sightings’ of Madeleine from Brazil to New Zealand have been assessed. But not one piece of forensic evidence linked to Madeleine has been found since she vanished.
In May, her parents posted a tribute to mark their daughter’s 15th birthday, telling her: ‘We love you and we’re waiting for you and we’re never going to give up.’
The message accompanied a cherished last photo of her as a three-year-old, smiling under a wide-brimmed sun hat.