Madeleine McCann: British police receive nearly 400 tip-offs after new suspect revealed

Almost 400 tip-offs about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann have been handed to British police since a new suspect was identified on Wednesday.

The convicted German child sex offender, named in reports as Christian B, remains in prison in Germany for another offence.

German police said they believe Madeleine is dead, but British police are continuing to treat her disappearance from a holiday resort in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in 2007 as a missing persons inquiry.

Referring to the Met Police's active investigation, a spokesman said: "The Op Grange team have had just short of 400 pieces of information through, in calls and emails."

Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, from Rothley, Leicestershire, welcomed the new appeal, saying they would "never give up hope of finding Madeleine alive".

Their spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, said on Friday: "They certainly will be encouraged to know the appeal is yielding results already and hopefully within that there will be crucial bits of information the police can act upon."

Prosecutors and police across Europe are reportedly looking into links between Christian B and the disappearance of two other children.

German prosecutors have contacted the family of Rene Hasse, a six-year-old boy who went missing in 1996 from a beach while on holiday in Portugal's Algarve, German media has reported.

They are also looking into whether Christian B was involved in the disappearance of Inga Gehricke, who was five years old when she vanished from a forest during a family barbecue in Germany's Saxony-Anhalt region in 2015.

Prosecutors in the northern German town of Stendal confirmed they are looking into possible connections between the cases of Madeleine and Inga - known as the German Maddie - but Christian B is not currently a suspect in the Inga case.

He reportedly had a property in Neuwegersleben, a town about 60 miles southwest of Stendal.

According to The Sunday Telegraph, the Belgian public prosecutor's office is investigating whether Christian B was connected to the murder of 16-year-old Carola Titze in 1996.

She was found in dunes near the seaside town of De Haan, where she was on holiday, having reportedly met a German man and been seen with him at a disco just a few days before she died.

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Sky News understands Christian B came back onto the radar of police investigating the Madeleine case in 2017 as a result of an alleged confession.

He was in a bar in Germany with another man when a report came on the TV about the anniversary of Madeleine's disappearance, and he said something to suggest that he knew what happened.

He also allegedly showed a video of himself raping a woman.

That video led to an investigation, and last year he was convicted of the rape of a tourist in the Algarve region in around 2005 - bringing him back into the frame.

German magazine Der Spiegel said his criminal record contains 17 entries, including a conviction for the sexual abuse of a child in 1994 when he was 17 years old, and a 2016 conviction for abusing another child and possession of child pornography.