Two British expats are among seven new suspects identified by detectives investigating the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.
The men, who have been declared arguidos or formal suspects by the Portuguese police, will be questioned later this month and ordered to provide DNA samples.
The Britons, who are not known to each other, are believed to have lived on the Algarve in Portugal prior to Madeleine’s disappearance on 3 May 2007.
They are among seven people identified as suspects by investigators. A further four individuals are being treated as witnesses.
Two other Britons – a man and a woman who also live in Portugal – will assist the police investigation as witnesses, the Guardian has learned.
Detectives are to question the suspects between 24 and 28 November in a process expected to include ordering them to provide DNA samples that may be matched against evidence recovered during the original investigation seven years ago.
None of the seven new suspects was questioned by Portuguese police in the summer, when detectives quizzed four Portuguese nationals about the three-year-old’s disappearance from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz.
Detectives from Scotland Yard’s Operation Grange investigation are pursuing a number of lines of inquiry, but Portuguese police chiefs are understood to consider the theory that Madeleine was abducted by a foreign national – rather than a local – as among the most probable.
The imminent questioning of new suspects comes after British forensic analysts visited Portugal last month to revisit some of the evidence retrieved from the Ocean Beach Club holiday apartment where Madeleine was last seen.
Before that, officers in July questioned four Portuguese nationals over the disappearance. Those interviews followed a ground-level search in Praia da Luz in June in an operation that failed to recover any new evidence.
