New search underway in Portugal for Madeleine McCann, the toddler missing since 2007

German and Portuguese police have opened a new search for Madeleine McCann, whose disappearance almost two decades ago became the most high-profile unsolved police investigation in Europe.

Sightings of Madeleine, who was 3 at the time of her disappearance, were reported as far away as Australia, and the investigation grabbed worldwide attention and became the subject of books and documentaries.

Portuguese police said Monday that they were carrying out “a broad range” of searches this week in Lagos, southern Portugal at the request of German authorities.

Prosecutors in the northern German city of Braunschweig said in a statement Tuesday that “criminal proceedings are currently underway in Portugal as part of the investigation into the Madeleine McCann case.”

Police in Germany have taken an active role in the investigation as the main suspect is a German national identified by media as Christian Brueckner.

The 48-year-old is serving a seven-year prison sentence in Germany for raping a 72-year-old woman in Portugal in 2005.

Brueckner, who has not been charged in the Madeleine case, spent many years in Portugal, including in Praia da Luz and denies any involvement in her disappearance. He has also asserted his innocence in the rape case.

Investigators were seen using pickaxes, shovels and chainsaws to clear dense vegetation and dig near a derelict building, near an abandoned rural building. Firefighters were seen pumping water out of a well.

The new search in the southern Algarve region is the first in two years and has taken investigators back to the area from which the child disappeared on the night of May 3, 2007: the Portuguese countryside, several miles from the apartment complex at which the British toddler had been vacationing with her parents in the popular resort town of Praia da Luz.

The last time police launched a search for Madeleine was in 2023, when detectives from the three countries searched near a dam, about 30 miles from the resort.

London's Metropolitan Police, which has been involved in previous searches, said in a statement that it was not present at this week's investigation.

Last month marked the 18th anniversary since Madeleine’s disappearance and her family expressed its determination to keep searching.

What happened to Madeleine remains a mystery even almost two decades on with British, Portuguese and German investigators working jointly.

The 3-year-old was in the same room as her two siblings, while their parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, had dinner with friends outside.

If no new charges are brought, Brueckner will be released at the end of this year. When that happens, Brueckner told German broadcaster RTL in an interview from prison, he plans to go into hiding.

He declined to discuss the Madeleine case in the interview.

“Right at the beginning of the conversation, Christian B made it clear to me that he did not want to comment on the Madeleine McCann case at all. He had agreed to this with his lawyers,” the RTL journalist says in the report.