POLICE in Belgium are examining CCTV footage after a bank worker said she saw a girl who looked like Madeleine McCann on Monday, it was reported today.
The report of the sighting comes as officers sift through hundreds of other sightings of the missing child.
A bank security worker said she saw the girl on Monday accompanied by a woman of North African appearance, on CCTV footage from a branch of KBC Bank in the west of Brussels.
The footage has been handed to police who told reporters the child "was said to be much like Madeleine".
Belgian police said they had received more than 100 reports of possible sightings and around 30 merited further investigation. The sightings come after it was revealed a Scotland Yard informant suggested Madeleine was stolen to order by a Belgian paedophile gang.
Met sources said they did "everything possible" with the tip and, despite warnings that the Scotland Yard intelligence may be flawed, investigators employed by Gerry and Kate McCann are vigorously pursuing the leads in Belgium.
The McCanns' spokesman Clarence Mitchell said the couple's investigators welcomed information about all possible sightings.
"The critical information they really need is recent sightings that would suggest where Madeleine is now," he said.
He urged people to pass on any leads to the detectives using the contact numbers on the McCanns' website, www. findmadeleine.com.
Madeleine was nearly four when she vanished from her family's holiday flat in the Algarve resort of Praia da Luz on 3 May last year.
Alain Remue, who heads the Belgian police missing persons unit, said about a third of the reported sightings in Belgium were from clairvoyants and another third lacked concrete information. Around 30, however, they were able to investigate.
He said officers had examined "every possible link" between the disappearance and the information they had received.
Belgian sightings recorded in Portuguese police files released this week included one from Line Compere, 31, who told Belgian police she saw a blonde-haired, blue-eyed child who looked "very much" like Madeleine with an eastern European couple on the number 18 tram heading towards the main Midi train station in Brussels on the morning of 15 May last year.
A British traveller contacted police after seeing a child asleep on a train from Brussels to Antwerp on 27 May last year and concluding she could have been drugged.
A girl looking strikingly like Madeleine was spotted in a shop in Mouscron, near the French border, accompanied by an English-speaking woman on 2 June last year.
A little girl with a "strong resemblance" to Madeleine was seen in a snack bar in Gooik, near Brussels, on 8 June with a known 33-year-old Portuguese man who lives in Amsterdam.
The man, who spoke English, Portuguese and a little Dutch, left in a hurry when the bar's owner started discussing Madeleine's disappearance with other customers.
Artist sketches of a man and woman seen in an Amsterdam shop with a girl who identified herself as "Maddie" have been released, based
on the evidence of Anna Stam, 41, who met a girl who looked like Madeleine in her shop in early May last year. She was with a man and a woman and two other children.
Meanwhile, it emerged yesterday that Portuguese police wanted to bug Mr and Mrs McCann but a judge refused to give permission. Police case files showed police wanted to eavesdrop on the couple's conversations before making the couple formal suspects last summer.
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NEWS REVIEW: The Maddie files: A tide of words that say littleThe full article contains 606 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
