A nanny who looked after Madeleine McCann has told how the youngster’s parents were plunged into despair and panic when the horrifying truth she had vanished sank in.
The former child minder said she is still haunted by the image of dad Gerry desperately trying to find their missing daughter while she tried to comfort weeping mum Kate who cried: “They’ve taken her.”
Breaking her silence after 10 years, the witness also claimed the resort from which Madeleine, vanished was considered so unsafe nannies were handed rape alarms and told to not go out alone.
And she slammed the Portuguese police’s handling of the disappearance, insisting their blundering scuppered any chances of finding who had snatched three-year-old Madeleine.
Gerry McCann’s father John was from the village of St Johnston, where the family owned a pub while he also has a large number of relatives in the Dungloe area.
Speaking of that dreadful night in May 2007, the ex-nanny – who looked after the girl several times – told the Irish Mirror “A parent came to me and said there was something going on, and said someone’s looking for a child, I didn’t instantly think it was Maddie.
“A couple of minutes later I walked into Kate crying, friends comforting her, Gerry looking under cars, and it just blew up. I don’t even think she saw me. I just stood next to her and tried to comfort her.
“She was pacing up and down. The worst possible thing had just happened to her.
“I think I said something like, ‘She’ll be found, these things happen all the time.’
“She was crying, but almost in a catatonic state, and Gerry was very distressed. That’s the one thing I really remember from him, looking under the cars. I can’t forget that.
“We were told to start looking in bins in case her body was in there. It was at that point we realised this was serious.”
Along with other staff, the ex-carer, who worked for travel firm Mark Warner at the the Ocean Club resort, sifted by hand in the dark through industrial-sized bins and piping leading into the sea in their hunt for Madeleine.
They also walked Praia da Luz’s small, winding streets searching for the missing girl until they were told, against their wills at 5am, that it was time for bed.
But the woman, who we are not naming, said she is still furious with local police , who she claimed took 90 minutes to arrive on the scene.
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