NEW Netflix documentary The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann has suggested the missing girl – who would now be 15 – may still be alive.

It's been suggested by the McCanns' private investigator, Julian Peribanez, that Maddie – who was just three when she vanished on holiday in Portugal – could have been 'abducted to order' by a child trafficking gang.

It may sound far-fetched, but if Peribanez's claims are accurate, Maddie could be a victim of a sick global trade known as ‘child laundering’ – in which children are sold into the sex trade, illegally adopted or even killed for their organs.

The investigator claimed a British girl is worth more money to evil child traffickers, and that Maddie could have been kept alive as a result.

He said: "They usually go for lower-class kids from third world countries — that’s the main supplier of these gangs.

“The value that Madeleine had was really high because if they took her it’s because they were going to get a lot of money.”

Terrifyingly, about 1.2 million children are stolen and trafficked globally each year.

Here, Sun Online looks into the sinister child abduction and trafficking trade.

'Baby factories' steal newborns from mums

While child kidnappings are rare in Europe and the UK, the latest figures showed the total number of abductions in the EU rose from 12,463 in 2009 to 14,886 in 2015 – a 19.5% increase.

Although some of these are gang-related kidnaps involving young teenagers, others are newborns and toddlers snatched from their parents.

In the UK, in the year 2016 to 2017 the number of non-parental child abduction offences recorded by police increased by 10 per cent to a total of 870.

Among child victims globally, 72 per cent of girls and 27 per cent of boys are trafficked for sexual exploitation, and the remainder for other reasons – including illegal adoption and organ harvesting.

Of those, the majority of younger children and babies are sold to childless couples – often in the US – for an average of £25,000, making it a lucrative business for the child-snatching gangs.

But in many parts of the world, including China, Africa and India, infants are taken from hospitals by corrupt doctors and nurses, while others are snatched from their parents' arms in public and sold for as little as £25.

In 2018, police rescued 160 children from a "baby factory" in Lagos, Nigeria. Mums-to-be had been offered free healthcare at two centres in the city, only to have their babies stolen from them at birth, while other women had been raped in order to make them pregnant before having their babies taken.

The babies were sold for adoption, used for child labour, trafficked to Europe for prostitution or killed in ritual ceremonies.

Stolen six-year-old found – but not returned to parents

Stolen children intended for adoptions are usually whisked halfway across the world and brought up by a middle class family miles away from their homeland.

Guatemalan mum Lloyda Morales's daughter Anyeli was snatched and stolen by a gang when she was two years old. Lloyda spent five years tracking down her daughter, posting fliers, being turned away at orphanages and even staging a hunger strike.

Eventually the Guatelamalan charity the Survivors Foundation stepped in and found her daughter on the files of an adoption agency, and traced a paper trail to her adoptive family in the US.

In a historic first, she managed to obtain a court order declaring the child stolen and ordering the Missouri couple who adopted her to give her back.

But in 2012, the US authorities refused to force the parents to relinquish six-year-old Anyeli and she remained with her American family.

Experts say that the rise in celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Madonna legally adopting 'orphans' from overseas has helped fuel the trade in illegal adoptions.

In 2002, Angelina Jolie adopted Cambodian son Maddox through aid worker Lauryn Galindo, who was later jailed for fraud and money laundering for her involvement in 800 illegal adoptions from Cambodia. However, Maddox's adoption was deemed legal.

According to shocking figures from United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, a baby trafficked from Central Asia for illegal adoption can fetch a price of £1,700 while a child sold on for organ removal can earn a trafficker up £142,000.

Baby boys sell for £10,000

In China, it’s estimated that 70,000 children are abducted every year – with a large number being stolen from hospitals as newborns.

Doctors, who typically earn around £300 a month, can rake in around £2,500 for faking a birth certificate for these stolen babies and the child can then be sold to adoptive parents either in the US or in richer areas of China itself.

China's middle classes still value boys more highly than girls, because of the belief they will take care of and provide for their parents. Healthy male babies are known as “quality goods” by traffickers, and are reportedly bought for £3,600 in a poor province and sold for £10,000 in the richer suburbs.

Girls, called “substantial goods” by twisted traffickers, can fetch around £7,500 and experts say Western children can fetch much higher prices.

In November 2014, police rescued five adopted children who had been stolen from their biological parents in southern China’s Fujian Province.

Authorities found that the director of a health centre in Guangdong had charged more than £2,000 per birth certificate and paid off nurses and hospital staff to fake medical records of pregnancy and delivery for the adoptive mothers.

'My husband sold my baby boy'

In poverty stricken villages, parents often sell their own babies to middlemen for as little as £25 – sometimes without the knowledge of their spouse.

Yang Jing, a 35-year-old mother from southwestern Sichuan, spent 13 years trying to get her son back after her husband sold him to a wealthy couple.

“They told me it didn't count as kidnapping… because the father gave him away," she said.

'She drugged me then stole my baby'

Another country which saw an epidemic of child abductions in the past is Guatemala, which lost 29,731 children between 1990 and 2011.

On a hot dry day in  2006, Raquel Par chatted to a friendly woman as she waited to board a bus with her baby girl, in her hometown of Tecpan, Guatemala.
The lady offered her a drink and she gratefully accepted – then lost consciousness.
When the bus pulled into Guatemala City, 90 minutes later, her baby girl was gone.

Guatemala has now made the practice illegal but, at the height of the problem, the sick trade was worth £75million a year – and was second only to the country’s banana business in terms of income.

Campaigners say the desperation of infertile couples who want to adopt babies has fuelled trafficking and kidnappings all over the world.

The US authorities rarely prosecute over illegal adoptions although, in Angelina Jolie's facilitator Lauryn Galindo's case, she was caught and sent to prison.

Discovered kids had been stolen

"The same story happens again in country after country," said David Smolin at Stamford University.

David became an expert after he and wife Desiree adopted two girls aged 9 and 11 from India – only to find they had been stolen from their family.

Their biological mother had sent the sisters to an educational institute miles from her home and when she visited them, she was told they had been sent abroad for further education. The reality was that they'd been trafficked for adoption.

Desiree said it was clear the two girls didn't want to be with their new family.

“When they finally dared to speak, they told us the truth: they were not orphans, but had been stolen and sold," said Desiree. "They even threatened them to lie in interviews with the embassy officials."

It took the couple six years to track down their mother and reunite them, by which time they were teenagers.

Unable to settle back in the Indian village of their birth they returned to the US to live with the Smolins.

300,000 children kidnapped in Spain

In June 2018, a court heard that in Spain as many as 300,000 babies were taken from their parents between 1939 and the 1990s.

The abductions were ordered by the Nationalist regime of dictator Francisco Franco, who ruled the country from the 1936 to 1975.  His officials stole the babies of political opponents and gave them to party supporters, often telling the mothers they had died.

As The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann Netflix documentary points out, sometimes parents are reunited with their abducted child.

Abduction expert Dr Ernie Allen says: “There are many, many cases we can point to in which children have been found, have come home alive, after months, after years.

“There have been cases in the United States in which witnesses, people who have information haven’t come forward for decades, and then one day provide information that helps lead to the resolution of the case.”

It points to the case of Jaycee Dugard, who was abducted aged nine in California and found 18 years later.

The series also references Carlina White, who was snatched as a baby from a New York hospital in 1987 but only learned the truth 23 years later.

The father of Elizabeth Smart — kidnapped from her home aged 14 and rescued nine months later — even contacted Kate McCann to give words of support. Ed Smart said: “I told her to keep the faith, keep hope alive.”

Since her disappearance in 2007, Madeleine McCann has become the most famous child abductee in the world.

There have now been 8,600 reported sightings in 101 different countries around the world suggesting that there is still a possibility she is alive.

But while the world will continue the search for her, 1.2 million children will continue to suffer at the hands of kidnappers and traffickers every year.

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