Madeleine McCann’s parents thank public for ‘being on our side’ after £12m missing probe is given £300k funding

KATE and Gerry McCann have thanked the public for "being on our side" as they continue their desperate search for Madeleine.

They posted the moving message online after cops received a £300,000 funding boost to the £12million investigation this summer.

The couple said there's "still work to do" after the cash injection was announced in July by the Home Office more than 12 years after their daughter vanished.

They said this week: "Thank you for being by our side as we continue to search for Madeleine."

They have vowed to carry on the worldwide hunt “for as long as it takes” with or without the support of police.

We previously revealed Scotland Yard’s hunt for Madeleine McCann is being led by a top murder cop already battling London’s knife crime epidemic, The Sun can reveal.

Det Chief Insp Mark Cranwell has recently been put in part-time charge of Operation Grange, which has cost taxpayers £12 MILLION to date.

He runs a tiny four-cop team trying to crack a case the Met has been investigating for EIGHT years.

So far it has not made a single arrest - yet was still granted another £300,000 by the Home Office in June.

Shock figures showed blade offences had soared by seven per cent in the year to June, a record high.

DCI Cranwell is playing a leading role in trying to combat it - making a series of appeals to the public in a raft of recent teenage murders.

And a DNA expert in the US could provide a breakthrough in the Madeleine McCann case after he offered to analyse samples held in the UK.

Dr Mark Perlin has claimed his Cybernetics lab in Pittsburgh, which was used to identify victims of the 9/11 terror attack, could get results after testing in the UK failed to get any meaningful evidence.

Madeleine McCann went missing on May 3, 2007 while her family were on holiday in Praia da Luz and Portuguese cops sent the samples taken during the investigation and sent them to the UK’s Forensic Science Service (FSS) in Birmingham.