Lisbon - The so-called "Maddie" case loomed large Tuesday over a meeting in Lisbon that saw EU justice ministers discuss a "child abduction alert."The meeting's host, Portuguese Minister Alberto Costa, greeted colleagues at the city's Expo area having read media reports that one of his country's chief investigators had strongly attacked his British colleagues over the handling of the affair.
"British police have only been working on what the McCann couple wants and suits them," Goncalo Amaral, the coordinator of the investigation on the case, told the daily Diario de Noticias.
Amaral was commenting on British reports on an e-mail sent to Prince Charles and alleging that the four-year-old child had been abducted by a former employee of the Ocean Club holiday apartments in the Algarve.
Despite an international media campaign launched by her parents, there has been no trace of Maddie since she went missing from the family's holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, in southern Portugal, on May 3.
Tuesday's accusations were just the latest in a growing list of blows exchanged by the proud Portuguese and the British over the handling of the affair, which has risked straining diplomatic relations between Lisbon and London.
And while officials in Lisbon would not publicly acknowledge as much, it is believed that Costa took advantage of Tuesday's talks to discuss the case with Britain's secretary of state for justice, Bridget Prentice, also present at the meeting.
"Cooperation between the British and the Portuguese police has been very fruitful, and I very much hope it will continue to be so. We just need to get on with the work. I have no further comment to make," a visibly irritated Costa told a British reporter when asked about the reports.
Local reporters interpreted the response as a strong caution directed at the Portuguese police.
"The message was: stop talking and get on with the work," the Portuguese colleague explained to his British colleague.
In any case, it's the Maddie controversy, rather than Tuesday's informal talks among EU justice ministers, that was expected to dominate the next day's newspaper headlines.
For those who have to deal with missing children on a regular basis, this is a shame.
While no comprehensive EU-wide statistics exist, data from individual members suggests thousands of children go missing each year.
In 2005, a total of 1,850 such cases were reported in Italy and just over 1,000 in Belgium.
Statistics from Britain show 846 children were reported missing while as many as 70,000 ran away from home between 2002 and 2003.
Most cases are resolved within a couple of days, however, and usually involve unhappy teenagers or parents involved in child custody litigations.
Real abductions and deaths are much more limited.
Data from Germany shows a total of 830 children have never been found in that country since 1950. Most of these are presumed to have drowned in lakes, rivers or seas.
The EU ministers meeting in Lisbon nevertheless agreed that the phenomenon of missing children was serious enough to warrant the setting up of an EU-wide child abduction alert.
Such an alert, immediately dubbed the "Maddie alert" by journalists following the ministerial talks, involves law enforcing agents in member states sharing information when such cases involve more than one country, such as with Madeleine McCann.
Ministers also discussed a system in place in France that sees police send out alerts via SMS to people who find themselves in the proximity of where an abduction has been reported.
