Hotel nanny breaks 10-year silence about the day Madeleine McCann vanished

The nanny who looked after Madeleine McCann while her family was staying at the Portuguese hotel where she vanished from in 2007, has broken her silence about what happened the day the British toddler went missing.

Ten years after the unsolved disappearance, the former child carer said she has not forgotten trying to comfort the little girl's distraught mother Kate who cried: “They’ve taken her,” after she realised her girl was nowhere to be found.

The three-year-old's parents have maintained their innocence over their daughter's disappearance from the Praia da Luz resort apartment while they ate at a nearby tapas restaurant.

“She was pacing up and down. The worst possible thing had just happened to her," the ex-child minder who has not been named, told The Mirror.

She said the ordeal was so haunting she couldn’t continue to look after children.

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"I just stood next to her and tried to comfort her.

“She was crying, but almost in a catatonic state, and Gerry was very distressed. That’s the one thing I really remember from him, looking under the cars. I can’t forget that."

The woman, who worked for travel firm Mark Warner's Ocean Club resorts at the time, said she and other staff searched for the little girl in the dark through the streets and inside industrial-sized bins until 5am.

She also alleged the Praia da Luz resort was known to be so unsafe nannies were given rape alarms and advised to not go out alone.

The ex-nanny also expressed anger at the Portuguese police who she claimed bungled the investigation and took 90 minutes to arrive at the hotel.

She said people were in and out of the hotel, potentially contaminating evidence at the crime scene, reducing the chances of ever finding the little girl's kidnapper.

“I know I didn’t step into that apartment but pretty much everybody else did. So, evidence gone, nothing.

"There was nobody there to say, ‘We need to lock this off now.’ The police didn’t get there for ages, maybe an hour and a half, so we were looking for her."

She also claimed she gave police a five-page statement during initial statements, but was then told there was only two pages of information passed along to investigators, alleging “whole chunks of information were missed out”.

Mark Warner, which operates in resorts internationally, reportedly left Praia da Luz two years ago.

Detectives are currently said to be working on a theory that she was kidnapped by a European trafficking gang.

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