Police searching for Madeleine McCann's body in a lake have warned of what they might find.
Detectives from Germany’s equivalent of the FBI - the Federal Criminal Police (BKA) - spent several days searching land next to the Arade Dam last month.
They used sniffer dogs, radar and search teams to scour the location just 50km from where three-year-old Madeleine vanished in 2007.
Prime suspect Christian Brueckner, 45, once referred to the location as his "little paradise".
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In an effort to track down clues as to if Madeleine had been thrown in, police dug several deep boreholes. But in a blow to Madeleine's family and their supporters detectives are now set to issue an update and confirm they have not found anything of note.
German public prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters told German newspaper Bild: “Please don’t expect too much.”
It remains unclear as to why investigators decided to search the land near the dam so thoroughly, Mirror UK reports.
Police teams were seen methodically chopping down trees and hacking away at undergrowth to expose an area just a short distance from the water.
Photographs appear to show the remains of a camp at the mysterious spot with broken furniture, a torn ship’s buoy and even what appeared to be a makeshift toilet fashioned from a chair.
Portuguese sources point to an informant giving police a specific tip-off that Brueckner visited the site just days after Madeleine went missing from her room in Praia da Luz.
This tip-off is believed to have been matched with geolocation clues found in the convicted paedophile's vile stash of 8,000 of videos and images. Together it is thought these clues combined sparked the search at the remote site.
It was claimed they were searching for a camcorder and a gun tossed into the water but Portuguese police sources were quick to dismiss that.
Regardless of what is found at the site, top German criminal profiler Axel Petermann, says the cops were right to dig at a place so close to Brueckner's heart.
He told Mirror UK: “The criminal perpetrators who I got to know over the years tend to hide their victims in places where they feel safe and can assess danger.
“These are places which are secluded and secret and where they can stop and assess various risks.
“They can also be places where they feel good, and where there is a certain private memory of a certain act.
“So, I think the search activity may have been going in this direction.
“My recommendation when dealing with suspects in the case of missing people, is always to find the places where these suspects spent time, where they had secrets, where they could assess risks, so from this point of view I think the investigators’ current search was very important.”
