This is the nerve centre of Scotland Yard’s £5 million investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.
The Standard was today allowed exclusive access to the incident room in London where detectives are running the world-wide inquiry into the missing child.
Located on the second floor of Belgravia police station, the room is the centre of a massive inquiry involving tens of thousands of documents and files. Detectives work surrounded by shelves stacked with 39,000 or so documents from the Operation Grange inquiry. A separate room contains more files from police and private detectives.
Detectives are poised to release a new appeal with “fresh substantive” material and a new theory of what happened when the three-year-old vanished.
Officers are combing through a huge log of mobile phone traffic identified in Praia da Luz, in Portugal, at the time of Maddy’s disappearance while she was on holiday in the Algarve with her parents Kate and Gerry McCann and her twin siblings six years ago. Detectives are focusing on a list of 41 so-called “persons of interest” including 15 British nationals.
The McCanns will appear live in the studio during an episode of BBC Crimewatch on Monday October 14 which will also feature a reconstruction of the night Madeleine disappeared in Portugal — and equivalent programmes are expected to be broadcast in Holland, Germany and possibly Ireland.
Detectives said new material uncovered by the inquiry does not implicate the family or their friends.
