Portuguese police have appealed for information about a man who they believe may have abducted missing British four-year-old Madeleine McCann.

Chief Inspector Olegario de Sousa asked members of the public to report sightings of a 37-year-old white man about 5ft 10ins tall, wearing a dark jacket, beige trousers and dark shoes

The man was seen in the Praia da Luz area, he said, on the night Madeleine disappeared at around 21:30 local time. He was "possibly carrying a child or an object that could have been taken as a child", Ch Insp de Sousa said.

"We appeal for that person to contact the police. We also appeal for any person who saw a person fitting that description to contact the police," he added, before naming telephone numbers for witnesses to contact.

When asked about whether the man in question was the only named suspect in the case, Briton Robert Murat, he remained vague, saying: "This description… is a description that many people could fit… [because] we are trying not to go down any wrong paths… if we make it more precise then we're complicating things".
Madeleine went missing on May 3rd from her hotel apartment as her parents ate in a nearby tapas restaurant. Gerry and Kate McCann said in an interview with the BBC earlier today that they believed her daughter was still alive.

"If anything really bad had happened we would have found her by now," he said.