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Praia da Luz: The girlfriend of the chief suspect in the hunt for Madeleine McCann was yesterday being quizzed for a second time.
Michaela Walczuch was called in for questioning yesterday morning - the 20th day since the four-year-old vanished from the Mark Warner complex in Praia de Luz - together with her estranged husband Luis Antonio.
The pair, who were questioned for several hours after Robert Murat was held last week, were being interviewed in Portimao.
The development came as Portuguese police admitted that forensic tests at the McCanns' apartment, Murat's villa and his business associate Sergei Malinka's flat had found nothing.
Walczuch had been having a relationship with Murat for 14 months after splitting from Antonio four months earlier. However, she and Antonio continued to live together in a flat in Lagos about five miles from Murat's home in Praia da Luz.
Appearance
All three have strenuously denied any links to Madeleine's abduction on May 3. However there has been speculation in several Portuguese newspapers this week that the three are strikingly similar in appearance to the people sought by Portuguese detectives in the early stages of the inquiry.
Yesterday the Portuguese scientist in charge of the forensic analysis said it had not been a textbook investigation.
Duarte Nuno Vieira, president of the National Institute of Legal Medicine, said: "This has certainly been nothing like you would see in the television series CSI."
Local police sought to distance themselves from the failure, claiming the tests had failed because the evidence had been contaminated by a range of different factors. Bizarrely, they claimed much of the evidence had been contaminated by small insects which had made test results inconclusive.
They also said evidence from Murat's villa, which is set off a quiet rural track, had been contaminated "because it was next to a busy main road".
The developments came as Madeleine's parents made a pilgrimage to the holiest site in Portugal yesterday to pray for a miracle. Gerry and Kate McCann travelled to the Marian shrine of Fatima to ask for their daughter's safe return.
Meanwhile a leading British criminal analyst yesterday launched a searing attack on the Portuguese investigation and demanded an immediate review of the case by UK detectives.
Nuno Vieira has denied media reports that tests on hair, fibre and sweat samples taken from the hotel room where 4-year-old Madeleine disappeared had yielded no clues.
Conclusions
"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."
Madeleine disappeared after her parents left her and her brother and sister, both aged 2, alone in their room while they went to a restaurant inside their hotel complex.
British police 'frustrated' at handling of case
Mark Williams-Thomas, a former detective who worked on the Sarah Payne murder inquiry and many paedophile investigations, said the handling of the case had left senior British officers "extremely frustrated". Williams-Thomas, who spent a week in Praia da Luz in the earlier stages of the inquiry, highlighted basic errors including:
- A failure to secure the crime scene. He called it "the worst preserved" he had witnessed in his career.
- A shocking lack of house-to-house inquiries in the early days.
- Lack of specialist fingertip searches of the streets around the hotel.
His comments came as British police urged officers to accept help from UK dog teams before it is too late. Dogs from Britain's national policing improvement agency can follow a scent for miles - even if it is up to 28 days old.
It also emerged that McCann had been unable to face staying at the family home on his return to Leicester on Sunday. A family friend said: "He told me it would be too painful to spend the night at home and that he just couldn't do it."
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