German prosecutors investigating a new suspect in a major breakthrough say they believe Madeleine McCann is dead.
The public prosecutor made the announcement today in a press conference, the night after revealing a new key suspect.
The authorities are investigating a 43-year-old German man on suspicion of murder.
"The public prosecutor's office in Braunschweig is investigating a 43-year-old German national on suspicion of murder.
"From this you can see that we assume that the girl is dead," Braunschweig state prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters told media during a press conference on the developments in Germany today.
Police are probing the child's disappearance in Portugal in 2007.
It is understood the man at the centre of the probe is Christian Stefan Brueckner.
German newspaper Braunschweiger Zeitung reported the suspect was carrying out a seven-year prison sentence for the rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Portugal in 2005.
The newspaper said he was convicted of the offence in Braunschweig district court in December last year.
Christian Hoppe, from Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), said the force have not ruled out a possible sexual motive for the alleged crime against Madeleine- which is being treated as murder by the BKA.
He added that the suspect may have broken into an apartment in the Ocean Club complex in Praia da Luz - where Madeleine was on holiday with her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, and her twin siblings Sean and Amelie - before spontaneously kidnapping her.
A BKA appeal said: "There is reason to assume that there are other persons, apart from the suspect, who have concrete knowledge of the course of the crime and maybe also of the place where the body was left."
The German national is known to have been in and around the area on the Algarve coast at the time Madeleine went missing shortly before her fourth birthday.
