KEY POINTS:
The head of a private detective firm hired by Madeleine McCann's parents to find the missing 4-year-old says he knows where she is and she could be home by Christmas.
Francisco Marco, the director of Barcelona-based Metodo 3, made the astonishing claims yesterday but said he did not want to reveal too many details until he was certain police could make an arrest.
He told a Spanish newspaper he was certain Madeleine had been taken by a group of paedophiles and was somewhere in the Iberian Peninsula or North Africa.
Britain's Daily Mail reported Marco as saying he could not exactly pinpoint Madeleine's location but he was confident she would be reunited with her parents by Christmas.
Marco told Spanish free daily Metro he was confident he knew which group of paedophiles was responsible for the abduction but his agency was still in the process of gathering proof so police could arrest them.
"I have no proof Madeleine is alive," he told Metro, but added he had "proof of her movements after her kidnap and we know she was alive the day after her disappearance."
"We are certain the kidnappers left Portugal at a certain moment in time," Macro said.
"I talk of certainties because we know which group may have her or could have kidnapped her to sell her on to others."
The claims come as police sources begin to admit the case against the McCanns is crumbling due to a lack of evidence.
Yesterday it was revealed that photographs taken of the McCanns' holiday apartment may be inadmissible in any court case against them.
A senior police source told Portuguese newspaper 24 Horas that detectives took only digital photographs of the scene, which were handed to an outside photography agency to print because police crime laboratory printers were broken.
The Daily Mail reported that police now had fears the images could have been tampered with - allegations which could bring their admissibilty as evidence into question.
Metodo 3 has worked for the McCanns since September on a 50,000 pound-a-month ($130,298 per month) contract bankrolled by the Find Madeleine Fund.
The agency claims to have around 35 investigators working on the case in Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and Morocco.
However Portuguese police are reportedly sceptical about Metodo 3's breakthrough claims.
Marco has previously come under fire for allegedly inflating claims of his investigation's progress and a close friend of the McCanns' raised concerns yesterday about the latest revelations.
"There are discussions about whether we wish this level of certainty to go out," he said.
"We do not want this said if it cannot be proved to be true. But certainly we believe that Metodo 3 is making progress."
The McCanns' official spokesman Clarence Mitchell said: "We remain absolutely confident in Metodo 3 and their operational capacity to find Madeleine."
- NZ HERALD STAFF
