Two convicted child abusers arrested in connection with the kidnapping of Madeleine McCann are expected to appear in court tomorrow.

Danilo Chemello, 61, and his Portuguese girlfriend Aurora Pereira Vaz, 54, were seized after attempting to secure the £2.5million reward for Madeleine’s safe return.

The couple were arrested during a dawn raid on Thursday at the exclusive Sotogrande resort in southern Spain. They are expected to make formal statements before an investigating judge at a court in San Roque tomorrow morning.

Spanish police sources said that Mr Chemello could then be taken to Madrid to face an extradition hearing at the Audiencia Nacional court and would probably be sent to France within weeks.

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Detectives in Spain and Portugal are still attempting to discover if the couple were directly linked to the abduction of Madeleine or were attempting to fraudulently claim the reward.

Police have found no trace of Madeleine, four, since she was abducted from the bed of a holiday apartment in the Algarve resort of Praia da Luz on May 3.

Dozens of newspaper articles about Madeleine’s abduction were found by police when they searched the villa occupied Mr Chemello and Ms Pereira Vaz. They also found a child’s cot or bed hidden in the garage of the property where the couple had lived for the past two months.

Detectives are believed the have been attempting to find the pair since they contacted a lawyer in Malaga on June 8 claiming to know where Madeleine was being held.

Officers have had them under surveillance since last Monday and decided to act on Wednesday night after discovering that Mr Chemello was wanted in France for offences related to child abuse. Two young children who were living with them were taken into the care of the local authority.

Mr Chemello is wanted in France for conspiring to kill a judge who had investigated the couple’s links to child abuse. The Italian national was known as a “respectable businessman” until his “life took a wrong turn” after he fell in love with Ms Pereira Vaz.

He made a fortune in the gravel business in Sandrigo, northern Italy and was happily married with two children before meeting Ms Pereira Vaz in the early 1990s.

She was married at the time to Enzo Alberto Tana, an Italian financier with a chain of bureaux de change, and they had a daughter.

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