A FAMILY friend of Kate and Gerry McCann has described for the first time why she is convinced that she saw their daughter Madeleine being abducted shortly before she was reported missing.

Jane Tanner, 36, saw a man carrying a child wearing pink and white pyjamas away from the McCanns’ holiday apartment on the Algarve in Portugal.

The sighting was considered so significant by the McCanns that they commissioned their own artist’s impression, which they released last week.

At the time Tanner attached little significance to the sighting, assuming that Madeleine had recently been checked. She instead returned to the tapas bar where the McCanns and other friends were eating.

Tanner told the police as soon as they arrived about the sighting but details have only now been made public by a friend.

When she was formally interviewed by police at 3am that night, Tanner realised that the pyjamas on the child she had seen were an exact match with Madeleine’s.

A friend said: “She regrets not attributing more importance to it in hindsight, but she never thought in a million years that it could have been Madeleine. When she heard that she was missing the first thing that came into her head was this person she'd seen and she felt complete horror.”

The McCanns have also launched a confidential hotline for sightings with an emotional interview on Spanish television in which Kate expressed her conviction that Madeleine is alive and “being held by someone in their house”.

The hotline yielded immediate responses, with three sightings of a girl matching Madeleine’s description in Morocco. Private investigators are trying to track down a 60-year-old woman seen with the child on each occasion.

A source close to the private detective agency in Barcelona which is running the hotline, said: “We are giving special importance to three calls we received about a girl resembling Madeleine in Morocco.

“One was from a Spaniard, the other two from British people. In each case the girl was about the same age as Madeleine, with blonde hair and blue eyes. And in each case she was with an old Moroccan woman, who was about 60 and middle-class.”

Despite the sightings the police investigation continues to focus on the McCanns and their friends.

Additional reporting: Graham Keeley

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