Madeleine McCann detective is named

Published on Saturday 14 May 2011 13:26

THE DETECTIVE who will lead Scotland Yard's review of the Madeleine McCann case conducted an investigation which snared a killer after a cold case review.

Scotland Yard said Detective Chief Inspector Andy Redwood, from the Homicide and Serious Crime Command (HSCC), would be the senior investigating officer in the case.

He led the investigation which captured murderer Miguel da Silva, who went on the run for 15 years after strangling mother-of-two Susan Martin, 44, in 1994. Da Silva was jailed for life at the Old Bailey last November and told that he must serve at least 16 years behind bars.

The court heard that da Silva, described as "possessive and controlling", throttled his lover at her flat in Notting Hill, west London, the day before she planned to leave him to go back to Manchester. He handed himself in to police but in 1995 escaped from a hospital and fled to Spain where he raped two women while on the run, before being traced in 2009.

In January 1999 he was jailed for seven years for raping a woman he had befriended in Torremolinos and in May 2008 was given a nine-year sentence for a similar attack in Salamanca. But the crimes did not at first lead to his capture by British police as he was using false identities. It was only after detectives launched a cold case review in 2009 that circulated his fingerprints to Spain and Portugal that they found he was already in custody.

The review of the case comes after intervention by Prime Minister David Cameron and has been criticised in some quarters as undermining the independence of the force.

Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, have welcomed it.

Portuguese police helped by officers from Leicestershire Police investigated Madeleine's disappearance from her family's holiday flat in Praia da Luz in the Algarve on 3 May, 2007, shortly before her fourth birthday. But the official inquiry was formally shelved in July 2008 and since then no police force has been actively looking for the missing child.