A farming family from the mountains of northern Morocco spoke of their surprise yesterday after a photograph of their blonde daughter was beamed around the world as a possible sighting of Madeleine McCann.

As the world’s media descended on Zinat, a small village in the Rif mountains, the parents of Bouchra Ben Aisa said that a picture taken on August 31 by a Spanish tourist was actually of their two-year-old daughter.

Ahmed Ben Aisa, 39, and his wife Hafeza Mohammed Akchar, 35, said they had not heard of Madeleine until yesterday. The family live in a two-room, single-storey house with no running water, electricity or phone.

The couple also said that their daughter could be responsible for reported sightings of Madeleine in Marrakech. The family visited the city in May, when a British man claimed to have seen a girl matching Madeleine’s description.

Mr Ben Aisa, an olive farmer, told The Times through an interpreter: “Today was the first time we have ever heard about it. We have never seen the television and we don’t get newspapers. It has been a very strange day.

“Bouchra is very famous but she is also very afraid. She’s very shy because she’s not used to having strangers around. She only knows the family and our neighbours.”

The couple have three other daughters, who were all born with blonde hair. Meriem, 11, Souhaila, 12, and Aziza, 16, all live with their parents, and a few goats, on the remote farm in the Jebala area of northern Morocco.

The country became the focus of searches for Madeleine after Clara Torres, a Spanish tourist, showed police a photograph that she had taken on August 31 on a road between Chaouen and Tetuan.

The picture, which showed a fair-skinned girl being carried on the back of a dark-skinned woman, was passed to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, in London, yesterday, for scientific analysis, after it was forwarded to the McCanns’ lawyers.

The sighting was the fourth in Morocco, but had greater credibility because it was backed up with photographic evidence.

Clarence Mitchell, the McCanns’ official spokesman, said yesterday: “We have heard no official confirmation on this yet, but clearly if these reports are true that’s obviously very disappointing. This is exactly why Kate and Gerry do not comment on these sightings.

“The search will continue and we urge everyone to keep focusing on ensuring Madeleine’s safe return. This Spanish couple did the right thing and we urge others to do the same.”

Despite the intense focus on Morocco, senior police officers there toldThe Times that they had had no contact from Portuguese or British police. The colonel in charge of the Gendarmerie Royale, the regional police force in Jebala, asked for copies of the picture so that he could circulate it to his officers. The chief of police in Tangier also said that he had not been contacted.

His immediate thought on seeing the photograph was that it showed a Moroccan girl. The method of carrying children in Morocco, in a back-slung papoose, prompts children to place their feet on their mother’s hips. A child who was not used to the position, he said, would find it too painful.

George Joffe, a University of Cambridge research fellow and specialist in North Africa, said that some in Berber tribes had fair-haired, light-skinned characteristics.

Dr Joffe said: “In northern Morocco people with blond hair and blue eyes are not so uncommon. It is a characteristic of the Rifi mountains.”

Even though the sighting has proved not to be of the missing girl, the directors of Madeleine’s Fund will start a new poster campaign in the country. Esther McVey, a director, said: “We today approved of the spending of £80,000 for the continuing search for Madeleine. There will be billboards put up in Portugal, Spain and probably Morocco. Just over £700,000 remains in the fund.”

Face to face

— Before it became clear that Bouchra Ben Aisa was the girl photographed by a Spanish tourist, a team in London had begun to analyse the image.

— The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre uses software designed to identify children in pornographic images.

— The system projects a map on to the image that picks out key features.

— Experts said that the image purporting to show Madeleine was extremely poor quality and could not have yielded a conclusive match.

— David McIntosh, of OmniPerception, a firm specialising in face recognition analysis, said: 100 miles “This is a large picture but at its full size it has very few pixels. It is a very low-resolution image”.

— Investigators were also hampered by Madeleine’s lack of a distinctive face shape. Nick Fieller, of Sheffield University, said: “Despite the fact that everybody now recognises Madeleine’s face it is actually a very normal face”.

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