Cleo Smith: WA police say they want to talk to driver of car seen near campsite about 3am
WA Police investigating the disappearance of Cleo Smith say they want to speak to the driver of a car seen turning south off Blowholes Road between 3am and 3.30am on the morning the four-year-old vanished from a campsite north of Carnarvon.
Detectives believe Cleo was taken from her family’s tent in the early hours of last Saturday morning.
On Sunday afternoon Det Supt Rod Wilde said the reported sighting of the car was a “very recent development” in the investigation.
“We want the person or persons who were in that vehicle to come forward and contact police,” Wilde said.
“We want to know who they were and what they were doing.”
But Wilde stressed the driver was not a suspect.
Cleo was last seen by her parents about 1.30am last Saturday. Her mother Ellie Smith said she woke around 6am to discover the little girl was missing.
It has been confirmed the zipper on the tent was found open to a height Cleo could not have reached, seemingly ruling out the possibility she wandered off on her own. Her red and black sleeping bag is also missing.
Wilde said the witnesses who reported seeing the car were “credible sources”.
He also called on anyone camping within the vicinity last weekend to call police.
“There’s still people out there that we want to catch up with and to speak to,” Wilde said.
On Thursday the WA government issued a $1m reward for information about Cleo’s whereabouts.
Earlier, the WA premier, Mark McGowan, said every resource had been directed to finding Cleo and he urged anyone with information to come forward.
“We all feel for her and her family and we just want to make sure that we find her as soon as we can, and that every effort is made to uncover her location so that the family can find out where she is,” McGowan said on Sunday.
At the same press conference, Commissioner Chris Dawson said police would “painstakingly go through every vehicle movement” and every piece of forensic evidence.
“This is a large scale investigation, but it is in a remote locality,” Dawson said.
“So in one sense, we’ve got an opportunity here to put a very large footprint around whoever was in the area at the time, it’s that sort of level of investigation and effort that we are capturing now.”