Portuguese police may begin digging in search of the body of Madeleine McCann this morning after a letter apparently giving details of where she will be found was sent to a Dutch newspaper.

The parents of the missing four-year-old girl were told about the letter yesterday. It was similar to one sent to the same newspaper last year, which predicted where the bodies of two missing Belgian girls would be found.

Police in the Netherlands said that they were treating the claim seriously because of the similarities with the letter that predicted where officers would find the bodies of Stacy Lemmens, 7, and Nathalie Mahy, 10, in June last year.

The letter said that Madeleine, who disappeared 42 days ago from the family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, was buried beside a dirt track that runs though scrubland close to a town called Odiaxere in the Algarve. It said Madeleine’s body would be found “north of the road under branches and rocks, six to seven metres off the road”.

Two A4-size maps of the Algarvewere included, marked by a cross and two question marks and a handwritten note.

Last night several plain-clothed police officers arrived at Arão, a small village nine miles from Praia da Luz, where they spent an hour and 20 minutes looking at fields and the surrounding area.

The McCann family and police in Britain and Portugal have received hundreds of letters from hoaxers and people claiming to have psychic powers who say they know what happened to Madeleine.

A spokesman for Mr and Mrs McCann from Rothley, Leicestershire, said: “Kate was distressed by the whole thing, as you can imagine.”

The two-paragraph, handwritten letter in Dutch was sent to De Telegraaf, a newspaper based in Amsterdam. Dutch police handed it to Portuguese officers yesterday.

Both letters used the phrase translated as “the presumable hiding place”, the handwriting was similar and both were accompanied with a map printed from the same Dutch routeplanner website. There was no mention of clairvoyance or psychic powers. The area located in the letter is about nine miles from Praia da Luz, on a road between Odiáxere and Pereira. It says the body is buried about four miles from Odiáxere and two miles from the main highway. It is about eight miles from Figueira, from where Joana Cipriano, 9, disappeared three years ago.

Chief Inspector Olegario Sousa, of the PolÍcia Judiciária, said that the information was being taken seriously.

The letter was posted just days after Mr and Mrs McCann visited the Netherlands as part of a European-wide campaign to raise awareness of their daughter.

The couple, who lived in Amsterdam for a year in 2004 when Madeleine was a baby, said that the Netherlands was important because of the large number of Dutch tourists in the Algarve.

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