Police
were preparing to swoop on burglars pinpointed as being very close to
the holiday apartment where the girl was staying with her family in
Praia da Luz in May 2007.
After a cold-case
review, detectives in London focused on the suspects following a
painstaking trawl through mobile phone records.
It is understood there was significant phone traffic between them around the time the three-year-old vanished.
One
theory is that the burglars raided the apartment and were panicked into
snatching the little girl when she woke up and started to cry. There
were reports of several break-ins at the Algarve holiday complex in the
weeks running up to Madeleine’s disappearance.
Her parents, Kate and Gerry, were said to be “on tenterhooks”.
The anxious couple, both 45, were being kept “fully informed”.
A
source close to them said: “Clearly, police cannot say if arrests are
imminent, but the fact that they are out there is significant.
“It doesn’t surprise us, it was only a matter of time. We knew officers would travel over as soon as they got the official nod.
