A FAMILY from Spain's north-western region of Galicia says a man identical to the photo-fit image of Madeleine McCann's suspected kidnapper attempted to abduct their little girl six years earlier.
A 'robot' image of a man seen in the aparthotel in Praia da Luz on Portugal's Algarve on May 3, 2007 was released five years ago, but it is only now that the family from Miño in Galicia has revealed they 'nearly choked on their dinner' when they saw the picture on TV.
“I don't know if the man in the photo kidnapped Madeleine, but as far as I'm concerned, it's the man who tried to run off with my daughter,” said businessman Andrés.
He and his wife and two daughters, aged 13 and five at the time, were on a road trip from their Galicia home through Portugal heading south, and stopped for the night en route.
“We ended up in a place called Abrantes [central Portugal], entered a modest hotel, and there was nobody there when we arrived,” Andrés says.
“On our way back from dinner, we came across an English lounge [sic] and saw a man dressed like a typical 'gentleman' – you know, folded pocket handkerchief, perfectly-combed hair, woollen jumper with a shirt collar, about 45 years old, with a gin and tonic in his hand.”
He addressed the parents in Portuguese - “Boa noite, que crianças máis lindas!” ('Good evening. What beautiful little girls!').
The Galicia family checked into two interconnected rooms and, at one point, Andrés' wife Celia went into the corridor in pyjamas.
“And there he was, and he said hello. What was he doing there? He and us, we were the only guests at the hotel that night,” Celia reveals.
“This man's room backed onto that of the girls.
“Minutes later, our elder daughter rang Andrés' mobile and asked, 'dad, I was half-asleep, but did you just come into our room'?”
She then started to scream because the 'English' man entered.
Andrés ran to his daughters' room to calm them down, but suspected the man would try again, so he hid behind the door – and caught him three minutes later.
When asked, in Portuguese, what he was doing, the man answered that he had 'come to see if the girls were tucked in'.
“To this day, I don't know how he got away from me – he slipped away like an eel,” Andrés laments.
He and Celia were furious when, on reporting to reception and asking them to call the police, they refused, saying the alleged Brit was a regular customer who just happened to like children but never did them any harm.
Andrés said he had tried to kick the man's hotel room door down so many times that he left a permanent footprint on it.
“If I find him, I'll kill him,” he said.
“How did he get my daughters' door open? Well, it was a handle you had to turn to close it properly, and it wasn't, so it didn't lock, and he was able to get in easily. And once in daylight, I saw there was a terrace behind the rooms which he could have used to get away.”
Andrés has made statements to the National Police in Spain, Scotland Yard in London – where he spoke to a policeman who was 'fluent in Spanish' - and the dedicated incident office set up by Kate and Gerry McCann, Madeleine's parents.
He said his elder daughter, who was by then 25, was in Palma de Mallorca when the McCann suspect's photo-fit image appeared on TV, and rang her parents straight away to tell them it was he who had entered her room in 2001 – but they had already recognised him themselves.
Despite having been contacted by the McCann investigation team and given numerous statements and told they would be in touch if anything else came to light, Andrés says he has never had a call since.
But, chillingly, he showed a journalist in Galicia this week a picture of a photograph of his youngest daughter in 2001 and she was shocked to see the resemblance between the little girl and the missing Madeleine, who was nearly four when she was taken from her Praia da Luz aparthotel room.
“They're identical, aren't they?” said Andrés.
Photograph: Two pictures of Madeleine McCann released at the time of her disappearance on May 3, 2007, when she was nearly four. The missing youngster would be almost 15 by now
