Extracted from:
http://news.asiaone.com/News/The%2BS...sh%2Bgirl.html
PORTIMAO (PORTUGAL) - IT IS not certain that traces of blood found in a car rented by the parents of a British toddler more than three weeks after she vanished are a match to their daughter.
The comment was made during a TV interview by a senior Portuguese police official in response to claims in the British press yesterday that there was a '100 per cent match' between DNA found in the car and four-year-old Madeleine McCann.
Sources quoted by newspapers in Britain said the Portuguese police now believe they have enough evidence to charge her parents.
The blood traces are being treated by detectives as strong evidence that Madeleine died in the holiday apartment in which her family was staying before her body was placed in the car, said a source.
'The parents have a lot of explaining to do,' he was quoted as saying in both The Times and Daily Telegraph newspapers.
But the director of the Portuguese judicial police, Mr Alipio Ribeiro, said a match was not certain.
'None of the results of the analyses allows one to say with certainty that the blood comes from X or Y,' he told Portuguese public television station RTP.
'Not with mathematical precision,' he said, as his officers prepared to report to prosecutors on the case yesterday.
The blood was found in a car rented by Kate and Gerry McCann 25 days after their daughter, who was three years old at the time, disappeared from the family's holiday apartment in the Algarve resort of Praia da Luz on May3.
Citing experts from the government-owned Forensic Science Services (FSS) laboratory in Birmingham, The Sun tabloid reported that the blood traces were an exact DNA match to Madeleine.
Sky News television also reported that, citing unidentified sources.
Portuguese police were expected to convey a report on Madeleine to prosecutors by yesterday so that they can decide if her parents, named as suspects last week, should be charged over her disappearance.
According to the Daily Mirror tabloid, the police have called for Mrs McCann to be charged with accidental murder, citing an anonymous source.
'The feeling is that the forensics support the theory that Madeleine died accidentally inside the apartment on the night she vanished, and she was then moved,' the source said. 'There has been talk of 70 per cent or 80 per cent matches. The FSS doesn't do that. It's either a match or it's not, it's either significant or it's not. In this case, it's significant.'
For the last four months, the McCanns have led a high-profile international campaign to find Madeleine, focusing on suspicions that she was abducted while they and friends were eating in a tapas bar in the same complex.
Last week Portuguese police received from a British laboratory the results of tests of blood samples from the bedroom Madeleine had been sleeping in before her disappearance.
The McCanns, both 39-year-old doctors, were named as formal suspects on Friday after two days of intense questioning by Portuguese police.
Members of their families said police suggested the McCanns hid the body and later disposed of it in the hired car.
In an interview with the Sunday Mirror newspaper, Mrs McCann said that Portuguese police had tried to persuade her to confess to accidentally killing her daughter.
Both parents - who had been based in Portugal since Madeleine's disappearance - returned home to Britain on Sunday. They deny any involvement in their daughter's disappearance.
'We have absolute confidence that when all of the facts are presented together, we will be able to demonstrate that we played absolutely no part in Madeleine's abduction,' Mr McCann wrote in a blog on
www.findmadeleine.com late on Monday.