BRIT tourists who told cops they saw Madeleine McCann at a petrol station in Morocco are convinced to this day it could have been her.

The tiny blonde girl asked a man "Can we see mummy now?" at the garage in Marrakesh six days after Maddie vanished in Portugal.

Brit expat Ray Pollard and wife Mari Olli, who live in Spain, were on holiday in North Africa and had not seen news of Madeleine's disappearance.

But they said the girl stood out when they spotted her at the filling station on May 9, 2007.

Mari, a former social worker originally from Norway, told a TV news report in 2007: "She had this pretty face and long blonde hair to the shoulders, green eyes.

"She had a sad look in her face. She said with an accent, 'Can we see mummy now?'"

And she told The Sun at the time she was "99.9 per cent certain" the cute child in blue pyjamas was Maddie.

Mari said: “She was standing alone with a man. She looked sad and a little lost. She looked so alone, I wanted to carry her or something."

The sighting – one of at least four in Morocco – was at a garage next to the Ibis Palmeraie hotel where the couple stayed in Marrakesh before driving to catch the ferry from Tangiers to Tarifa.

Experts say traffickers may have used the same route in reverse to smuggle Maddie from the Algarve through southern Spain.

That night they recognised Madeleine from TV reports as the girl they saw in Morocco.

POLICE 'DIDN'T WANT TO KNOW'

More than a decade on, they are still haunted by the missed chance of potentially rescuing her from kidnappers.

Mari told the new Netflix documentary: "A little blonde girl in that petrol station in Marrakesh, was not a very normal thing to see.

"It was so strange what I saw. And when I saw the picture, it just hit me."

Mari says she tried to call police in Spain and Portugal but got nowhere. Ray said: "They didn't want to know."

She also reported it to Scotland Yard in London and later emailed Kate and Gerry McCann's local force in Leicestershire.

The petrol station was one of the few places in Morocco with CCTV at that time – but staff taped over the footage.

Ray said: "If we'd have known a little girl was missing, then we could have probably done something about it.

"We didn't know the thing in her eye. By looking at her, you could have said, yes it's her, or no it not her.

"But we didn't know and that is the most upsetting part about it, that we had a very close encounter but we didn't know."

Madeleine, three, went missing from her family's holiday flat in Praia da Luz on May 3, 2007.

The hit Netflix series explores various evidence and theories, including experts' belief she was snatched to order by a trafficking gang and could still be alive.

Another sighting of a woman carrying a blonde girl in Morocco's Atlas mountains sparked a huge search.

But tycoon and McCanns supporter Brian Kennedy flew in by private jet and confirmed it was a different child.

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