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Lisbon: The police search for Madeleine McCann came under fire yesterday as a leading expert said the Portuguese investigation had been plagued with "serious errors."
Former Surrey officer Mark Williams-Thomas said detectives had failed to seal off the apartment when the toddler vanished, had not made a direct public appeal, and had not carried out proper forensic searches.
He said the investigation had hit "a brick wall" as a result and called for British detectives to carry out a full review of the case to ensure that everything was being done to find Madeleine.
Her parents, Gerry and Kate McCann, were at the same time making an emotional pilgrimage to a Portuguese shrine to pray for the safe return of their daughter.
Meanwhile, forensic tests on evidence gathered in the case of the girl who vanished 20 days ago during a family vacation in Portugal are still far from being completed, a senior official said yesterday. The head of the National Forensic Medicine Institute, Duarte Nuno Vieira, denied media reports that tests on hair, fibre and sweat samples taken from the hotel room where Madeleine McCann disappeared had yielded no clues. "The analyses are ongoing," Vieira told Lisbon radio station TSF. "They're far from over, and we'll only be able to draw conclusions once they're completed...Things don't go as fast as they do on television."
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