Madeleine McCann’s parents and ‘Tapas Seven’ have NEVER been quizzed as witnesses by Brit cops – as police hunt ‘person of significance’
THE PARENTS of Madeleine McCann and their “Tapas Seven” holiday pals have never been quizzed as witnesses by Scotland Yard into her disappearance.
The £12million six and a half year police probe into Maddie’s feared kidnap, which is hunting “a person of significance”, has not once asked Kate and Gerry, their friends and other key witnesses, for their account on the night the youngster vanished.
The Met detectives have been relying on Portuguese transcripts of key interviews with British witnesses, and have never conducted their own, The Times has learned.
Neither Gerry and Kate McCann nor their seven friends they dined with on the night Maddie vanished have been formerly interviewed.
Former Met detective chief inspector Collin Sutton, said: “I would conduct fresh interviews with all the key British witnesses. We’re talking about interviews given by the McCanns and friends through an interpreter, written down in Portuguese and then translated back into English so officers from Grange can read them. The room for error would be enormous.”
A source close to Scotland Yard's search Operation Grange said the new individual is now a "critical line of inquiry" in the investigation.
The source told the newspaper: "It is as much to rule out the person out of the inquiry as anything else."
Madeleine vanished in May 2007, while on holiday with her family in Praia de Luz, Portugal.
The girl, who was then three, was left sleeping in a hotel with her siblings after her parents went for dinner.
Her parents Kate and Gerry McCann have since vowed to never give up on trying to find their daughter who would now be 14.
Kate said: "We will go on, try our hardest, never give up and make the best of the life we have."
The news comes days after cops received £154,000 to keep the investigation afloat.
The extra cash is set to fund the search until March next year.
Kate and Gerry were "extremely thankful to both the Home Office and Scotland Yard for the continued funding," their spokesman Clarence Mitchell said.
Operation Grange was launched in 2011 after the Portuguese-led investigation was shelved in 2008.
There have been more than 8,000 potential sights of the Brit three-year-old since her disappearance.
One of the most seriously regarded sighting was in Amsterdam, 2008.
Shopkeeper Anna Maria Stam told cops a three or four-year-old girl who resembled Madeleine, told her she was with a "stranger" who had taken her "away from mummy".
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