A TOURIST staying in the apartment above the McCanns' saw a suspicious man leaving the ground floor apartments on the day Maddie vanished, a documentary claims.

The strange sighting could hold the keys to unlocking the mystery behind the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007.

The notorious missing child case is the subject of a new eight-part documentary on Netflix titled The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

Maddie disappeared from her bed on May 3, 2007, while on holiday with her parents and family friends at a resort in Praia da Luz, Portugal.

Her parents, Gerry and Kate McCann, had left her sleeping with her siblings while they had dinner at the hotel's restaurant – only realising about 10pm that she was gone.

'IT LOOKED VERY STRANGE TO ME'

Investigator and author Anthony Summers told Netflix producers: "Perhaps the most telling sighting of all is that of Carole Tranmer who had been out to see her aunt who was living in the apartment immediately above the McCanns.

"Carole was looking out of the window.

"She said: 'Looking down below the McCann flat I saw someone come out of the ground floor apartment closing the gate very carefully and quietly.

'It looked very strange to me. He looked to one side and the other, shut the gate and walked very quickly below. This is on the afternoon of the day Madeleine is going to disappear.'

"What had struck her as peculiar, she said, was 'the way the man had closed the little gate down there. It his furtiveness that got my attention. The man had moved stealthily as if he didn't want anyone to know he was coming or going'."

Mr Summers added: "That has to be significant in any investigation of this case."

TRAFFICKING ROUTE

It comes as we reported how the President of the Portuguese Association of Missing Children, Patricia de Sousa Cipriano, told the Netflix producers: "We have information that our country is used by traffickers to pass children to other countries.

"They enter the country through the Algarve and then they go to Spain, to France, to Germany, to be exploited.

"They have a very strong structure that allows them to move human beings from one country to another in a matter of hours. It's frightening because it's very easy."

MADDIE'S HAUNTING WORDS

In 2011 Kate also wrote her own account of what happened that evening for a book titled "Madeleine: Our daughter's disappearance and the continuing search for her".

In it, Kate reveals Maddie's haunting words to her the day before her disappearance.

She wrote about how Maddie asked her: "Why didn't you come when Sean and I cried last night?"

Kate wrote: "Madeleine didn’t answer or elaborate. Gerry and I were disconcerted. Could Madeleine and Sean have woken up while we were at dinner? If so, it was worrying, obviously, but it didn’t seem very probable."

Meanwhile, Maddie's parents have slammed the new Netflix documentary on her disappearance, saying it "won’t help" the search.

The family also believe the controversial new film could "fuel conspiracy theorists", their spokesman said.

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