'I'm convinced the little girl I saw was Madeleine McCann': The riddle of Maddie and 'the fat gipsy women'

Private investigators searching for Madeleine McCann mounted a surveillance operation amid fears that she was being held prisoner in a run-down farmhouse, secret police files reveal. They acted after a British holidaymaker spotted a ‘gaunt’ blonde girl wearing a black wig being dragged by ‘gipsy women’ 30 miles from where Madeleine was snatched. Jean Godwin, 56, a retired care home worker, said the girl she saw on the Algarve was ‘100 per cent Madeleine McCann’. One of the women spotted in Carvoeiro by Mrs Godwin was seen by another British tourist acting suspiciously outside the McCanns’ apartment on the day the youngster vanished from Praia da Luz. The evidence prompted investigators to follow their suspect to an isolated farmhouse in an orange grove near the town of Silves, north of Portimao. In the following months she paid several visits to the property, a holiday home owned by a teacher and his partner whom the inquiry team deemed to be ‘suspicious’. (Daily Mail)