A 12-year-old British girl was found sobbing in a French airport after a Belgian man abducted her from a holiday villa and tried to take her on a flight to Madrid.

The girl from Glasgow had been staying with her family in a villa in Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer in the South of France when she was lured away by a 41-year-old man she had met on the internet.

The man had made contact with the girl online four months earlier, when he claimed to be 28. On Friday he abducted her from her family’s holiday villa and took her to Marseilles Provence airport to board a flight to Spain.

When he arrived at the airport, he discovered that the girl had no travel documents with her, and abandoned her in the terminal. He went to board a aircraft bound for Madrid.

The girl, who has not been named for legal reasons, was found sobbing and alone in the airport and told police that a man had been trying to take her to Spain. Police from Marseilles boarded the plane and arrested the man minutes before the flight was due to take off.

Police said that the girl had been missing for about three hours when she was found, and that her parents had not reported her disappearance in that time.

A police spokesman said that the abduction had taken place in the middle of the day when her parents thought that their daughter was out playing. The man had taken her in a taxi and police said they believed that he had followed her to Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer after she told him where she was going with her family.

The girl met her kidnapper on the social networking and role-playing website Gaia.com, which describes itself as “an online gathering of environmentally and spiritually conscious people”.

The man told the girl that he was 28 and apparently also contacted her by e-mail and told her that he would find her when she arrived on holiday.

The man arrived in the resort last Tuesday, and waited three days before luring the girl away from the villa where, according to Le Figaro newspaper, she had been staying with her parents, brothers and sisters. The police spokesman said: “When we notified the parents, they were horrified to learn their daughter had been found at Marseilles airport.

“It seems she had at first gone with the man willingly, but he abandoned her at the airport when he found she had no passport. She told the aiport police the man was aboard a flight to Spain.

“The plane was halted about ten minutes before take-off and a 41-year-old Belgian suspect was found on board.”

The man, who lives in Spain, told frontier police that he was the girl’s uncle, but he was arrested and remanded in custody in the town of Luynes over the weekend before being charged with child abduction by a court in Aix-en-Provence on Monday.

The girl was returned to her family in their holiday resort.

Campaigners in Europe have been lobbying governments to set-up an all-ports alert system similar to the Amber Alert system in the United States, which would notify air and shipping ports across the continent when a child was reported missing.

Experts say that such a system could have aided in the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann and might also have alerted police to the actions of Robert Williams, the Scottish lorry driver who was jailed last month for abducting and having sex with a girl aged 15 before taking her to France.

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