More than six years after Madeleine McCann vanished from a resort in Portugal, police may have made a breakthrough in the search for the British child. British police officers analyzing data gathered after her disappearance in 2007 have released computer-generated images of a man they suspect could be key to unlocking the case, the BBC reports. Witnesses place the man—described as a white man of medium build, somewhere between 20 and 40 years old with short brown hair—at the scene of the disappearance but he has never come forward to speak with investigators.
Investigators were able to "make massive steps forward" in the case by taking all the material gathered so far and trying to "draw everything back to zero... take everything back to the beginning and then reanalyze and reassess everything, accepting nothing," a police spokesman says. He adds that the mystery man's significance only became apparent after the information was cross-referenced. Madeleine would now be 10 years old and her parents say they haven't given up hope that she could still be alive. (More Madeleine McCann stories.)