Police investigating Madeleine McCann's disappearance have been alerted over a spate of attempted child abductions in northern Portugal, it has been revealed. (Monday 18th February 2008)
At least four children have been targeted in the last month in the region of Coimbra, where a nine-year-old girl escaped from an abductor in December. Police are investigating if the cases are connected, and if they could be related to Madeleine's disappearance from Praia da Luz, some 300 miles away in the Algarve, last May.
Meanwhile, it is understood Kate McCann is quitting her job as a locum GP to devote her life to children's charities. Mrs McCann has not returned to work since Madeleine's disappearance in May and has reportedly told friends she feels she has a lot to offer charity organisations.
Private detectives searching for four-year-old Madeleine believe she was targeted by a paedophile network and smuggled out of Portugal, and that other children could also have been taken. In the first reported attempted abduction, in December last year, a man bundled a nine-year-old girl into his car as she walked home from her school bus stop in the village of Charneca, near Coimbra. The terrified girl told police he held on to her and drove her about a mile away, but she managed to escape when he was forced to brake to let another car pass on the remote, narrow road. She ran crying back to the village and told police her abductor spoke Portuguese with a Brazilian accent, wore an earring and drove a grey car.
Since then there have been two more attempted abductions in nearby villages, including an attack three weeks ago when two men in a car tried to grab a 13-year-old girl after she also got off her school bus to go home. Her mother, who was waiting for the girl, saw the men and screamed, and they released the teenager and fled.
Then on Thursday nine-year-old Clarisse Neto was targeted as she walked to a music class at her school in Vila Nova de Poiares, about five miles from Coimbra. Two men in a light-coloured car approached her and signalled for her to get into the car, shouting: "Come here, come here." Clarisse screamed and ran to a nearby health centre, where workers called the police.
Police said the girl was "traumatised, very panicked and very confused" by her ordeal, and could only describe the two men as both wearing woollen hats.
Her father Augusto Neto told the Portuguese newspaper Correio da Manha: "If they took my daughter I would never see her again. The country is small, the borders are very close. She will not be going to school alone any more. I will not let anyone else try to steal my daughter. I love my family and I will not let anyone harm them."
A police source said there had been several reports of attempted abductions in that area, including another attempt on Saturday, in the village of Vale do Tronco, but refused to reveal details of the latest attack.
