The private investigator hired by the McCann family to find Madeleine has issued a harrowing update on what could have happened to her when she vanished nearly 20 years ago. Julian Peribañez has no intention of giving up the search for the missing girl and has revealed his own theories about her disappearance.
Investigator's theory and plea
Speaking to the Olive Press, Mr Peribañez said: "I don’t know if she’s alive or not, because hardly anyone on Earth does. But as long as I have hope, I won’t stop looking." He has continued to pursue his own lines of inquiry and believes that Madeleine was kidnapped by an Eastern European trafficking gang.
He urged anyone in the Algarve region with information to come forward, adding: "If you’ve had encounters with people who fit the profile, please reach out. All I need is a name. Give me a name, and I’ll chase it wherever I have to."
The night Madeleine vanished
Madeleine was three years old when she disappeared from her family's ground-floor holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, on the evening of May 3, 2007. Her parents, Kate and Gerry, had left her and her younger twin siblings sleeping while they dined at a tapas restaurant roughly 55 metres away, taking turns to check on them throughout the night.
At around 10pm, Kate discovered Madeleine's bed empty and the bedroom window open, triggering an international search effort that quickly grew into one of the most high-profile, complex, and protracted police inquiries in modern history.
Investigation status
The multi-agency investigation has seen thousands of leads pursued across Europe, including Scotland Yard's Operation Grange, yet the case remains formally unsolved. German prosecutors have spent years focusing on convicted rapist Christian Brueckner, who was identified as the prime suspect in 2020 after phone records placed him near the holiday resort on the night Madeleine disappeared.
However, no murder charges have been brought against him regarding her disappearance, and the case has repeatedly stalled amid complex legal battles and separate criminal trials. Brueckner had been accused of committing five offences in Portugal between December 2000 and June 2017, though the appeal is only being made against four charges. One of the most shocking allegations concerned the rape of an elderly woman, which prosecutors claimed had been filmed, but judges ruled that the witnesses’ descriptions of the alleged video were insufficient to establish what had happened.
