Will Madeleine now be found? Daily Express.

Will Maddie Now Be Found?

Sunday July 5,2009
By Hilary Douglas

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/111964/Will-Maddy-now-be-found-

A GIRL found alive after being kidnapped six years ago has given hope to Gerry and Kate McCann in their anguish for missing daughter Madeleine.

Police found the girl, now eight years old, after a nightmare battle by her distraught parents.

Like the McCanns, they had never given up the search for their missing daughter.
And also similar to Madeleine’s disappearance, Monica Serrano, then 18 months old, was snatched from her family as she slept.

She was staying at her grandmother’s house in the town of Arraigan in Panama when she went missing on February 8, 2003.

Last night Interpol detectives were carrying out DNA tests to confirm that the little girl now known as Angelis Mitre Castillo is Monica.

She had been living in Guayaquil in Ecuador for some years before police were tipped off that she looked identical to the girl who was kidnapped.

Monica, and as she is today
Last night the McCanns’ spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, said: “This gives Kate and Gerry hope. But they will never ever be satisfied until their daughter is found safe and well.

“It shows that investigators and Interpol can play an important part in finding missing children, but hopefully it will not take nearly this long to find Madeleine.”

Just like the McCanns, the Serrano family have fought desperately to find their daughter and struggled to keep the story alive, with regular updates on how she would look as she grew up.

According to the Ecuadorian daily paper Expreso, Ecuadorian authorities said that a woman called Maria del Carmen Medina Reyes brought little “Angelis” to Ecuador, then travelled to Spain having left the child with another women, Matilde Ronquillo.

Police learned two months ago that the child was in Guayaquil, Ecuador, with Oredai Nieto Reyes, sister of Maria, and who had originally turned up with the child out of the blue. “She told us that the girl had been gifted to her,” said Nieto Reyes in her declaration to prosecutor Rene Astudio Orellana.

Reyes admitted that she registered the child irregularly as an Ecuadorian with the help of a lawyer and that the child has lived in south Guayaquil since then.

“I thought nothing would happen seeing as I’ve never been involved in these cases,” Nieto Reyes said before police officers and the prosecutor.

According to a local news agency, the woman is now detained by the police. The dramatic rescue began last January when Interpol in Panama was contacted by a mystery woman saying she had seen a little girl in Ecuador who looked amazingly like missing Monica. She had recently seen a newspaper report on the story of the family’s torment over their missing daughter.

A source said: “The article was accompanied by a picture where the little girl had been aged to look as she would today and the lady thought the resemblance was too remarkable to be wrong.

“She called up Interpol as their number was given at the end of the newspaper piece.”

Castor Serrano, Monica’s father, said the prosecutor informed him they were on top of the case and were sending a delegation to Ecuador for further investigation.

Jose Vicente Pachar, from Ecuador’s Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences Institute, said they would have to wait for the DNA tests to confirm the identity of the child. The Attorney General said yesterday Panama has 48 hours to prove the child is Monica.

Last night investigators working for the McCanns ruled out paedophile Raymond Hewlett as a suspect in Madeleine’s disappearance.

They wanted to question the British sex offender after it came to light he was in the Algarve at the time Madeleine went missing.

Madeleine, who is now six years old, was kidnapped while on a family holiday to Praia da Luz in the Algarve in May 2007.