Police have turned to specialist ground penetrating radar as searches intensified in the desperate hunt to finally solve the mystery of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.
The hi-tech equipment, which can map underground terrain up to 10 feet deep, arrived at a remote area along with a JCB digger on the second day of renewed searches for the missing toddler on Wednesday.
Investigators are scouring a string of derelict farmhouses and outbuildings in a remote stretch of scrubland just over a mile from the resort of Praia da Luz, where the British toddler vanished in 2007.
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The 120-acre area, off a dramatic clifftop path along the coast between Atalaia and Lagos, is said to have once been populated by a farming community, but has long-been abandoned because it is so arid.
Now up to 21 of these derelict structures are understood to be the focus of a fresh searches initiated by German investigators 18 years after Madeleine disappeared as they face a race against time to bring charges against their only suspect, Christian Brueckner.
Small teams of German Federal Police, supported by local police, have been using shovels, pickaxes and chainsaws to clear rubble and cut back gorse under the watchful gaze of the world’s media since Tuesday.
Nothing significant was found on the first day of searches, Portuguese media reported.
Efforts were ramped on Wednesday as officials brought in the high-tech equipment, which uses electromagnetic waves to map the underground terrain.
Portuguese police haven’t been told what intelligence German investigators are acting on, but unless they uncover anything significant by the end of Thursday they will pack up and head home, it is understood.
Kate and Gerry McCann, who last month marked the 18th anniversary of her disappearance, are not commenting during the “active police investigation”, the Find Madeleine Campaign said.
Brueckner, who is due to released from prison in September for a separate rape in Praia da Luz in 2005, was living in a run-down cottage in a valley less than a mile from the search scene at the time Madeleine vanished.
A neighbour described the suspect – who denies any involvement in her disappearance – as an “angry” young man who she would hear having rows with his girlfriend.
“If I was riding past and he’d be standing outside, we’d say hello, you know, how are you,” she said. “Nothing more. Then we found out he was a really nasty piece of work.”
The resident, who used to ride her horse around the 120-acre search area, said the farmhouses and outbuildings on the site have been derelict since at least the 80s.
“It is the first time I’ve heard of Atalaia being searched,” she said. “I know the properties because I used go the up there all the time with my horse. I know exactly where they are. Whether he’d been up there or done anything, no clue.”
Now knowing the full extent of the allegations against him, she called for him be locked away for the rest of his life “because of what he has done and what’s been uncovered about him is quite despicable”.
Asked for her opinion on the search operation, she told The Telegraph: “It’s a pile of rubbish, we are all so exhausted, it just goes on and on.”
Brueckner is due to be released from prison in September as his seven-year term for the rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Praia da Luz in 2005 comes to an end.
He was cleared by a German court last year of unrelated sexual offences, alleged to have taken place in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.
Speaking to German broadcaster RTL, Brueckner said he planned to disappear after his release from prison.
The 48-year-old said: “The fact is that I have been in prison for many years for something that I cannot have committed and that therefore, through the participation of the media, half the world considers me a cruel rapist.”
