Police in Portugal have begun using radar to scan roadwork trenches for any traces of the body of Madeleine McCann.

Madeleine was three when she disappeared on May 3, 2007, during a family trip to the child-friendly resort of Praia da Luz in the Algarve region.

Authorities launched a fresh search near where the toddler was last seen 18 years ago, covering 20 properties, cisterns, wells and ruins, according to sources close to the investigation.

This search will be focused more on groundworks and roadworks, which had been taking place when Madeleine disappeared. Police fear she may have been buried in trenches near Praia da Luz.

Police received a tip-off after suspect Christian Brueckner’s trial last year about where someone who took Maddie’s body would dump it, prompting the new search with high-tech ground-penetrating radar.

Germany’s MI5, known as the BKA, is using ground-penetrating radar to see if it can find any traces of the young British girl.

A nearby property, which was used by the suspect Brueckner, 48, will also be a focal point.

The German national used a cottage just half a mile away from where she disappeared as a ‘rat-run’.

Though this is the first major search for Madeleine in nine years, there are worries police may not find anything.

The last major search was in June 2014, and saw British police dig around Praia da Luz with sniffer dogs and use ground-penetrating radar.

Those Scotland Yard digs were linked to the theory that Madeleine died during a break-in and burglars dumped her body nearby.

British officers also failed to produce any evidence pointing to the missing youngster’s whereabouts.

How does the ground-penetrating radar work?

Ground-penetrating radar, which is being used by German authorities in Portugal right now, uses high-frequency radio waves to detect any changes in the soil.

The transmitted waves, when returned back to the receiver at the surface, can help create a sort of topographical map of the soil beneath the operator’s feet.

The technology was used in Canada to identify burial sites on the grounds of former residential schools, where hundreds of indigenous children were found.

Kisha Supernant, who works at the University of Alberta, previously explained how the tech works.

‘When we’re using it to try to locate potential unmarked graves, what we’re really doing is we’re sending that signal through the ground and then trying to create a map of what we think we see below the surface,’ she told the Vancouver Sun.

‘When you dig a grave, you disturb the soil … and ground-penetrating radar can sometimes detect that change in the soil from the digging of the grave itself.’

What links Christian Brueckner to her disappearance?

Brueckner has denied all the charges against him and any involvement in Maddie’s disappearance.

Brueckner is known to have frequented various areas in the Algarve region surrounding Praia de Luz.

He allegedly exposed himself to a German girl on a beach in Salema in April 2007 and is said to have sold cannabis to teenagers near the holiday apartment where the McCanns stayed, according to MailOnline.

Multiple searches have been carried out in Portugal and Germany over the years, including a remote reservoir in the Algarve.

He may have visited the spot around the time of Maddie’s disappearance.

When searching an abandoned factory owned by Brueckner, detectives made disturbing findings they have revealed now, including children’s clothes, toys and a suitcase full of images of young girls.

They also found more than 75 children’s swimming costumes, a handgun and chemicals, which were never tested before police destroyed them. They are thought to have been chloroform or ether.

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The prime suspect in Madeleine McCann’s disappearance worked in the tapas bar her parents were at the night she disappeared, according to a man who knew him.

German criminal Christian Brueckner, 47, lived just a 12-minute drive from the Ocean Club tapas bar frequented by Kate and Gerry McCann.

The McCann family were staying at the resort in Praia da Luz, in Portugal’s Algarve region, when Madeleine went missing from their holiday apartment in 2007 when she was just three years old.

Now it’s emerged Brueckner worked cash-in-hand at the restaurant, according to claims from a British acquaintance, Ken Ralphs, MailOnline reported.

This may have given him access to a booking ledger showing staff that McCann’s children would be alone that night.

Ralphs, who knew Brueckner at the time, claims the German man recruited a mutual friend as part of a plot to kidnap a child just a week before Madeleine disappeared.

They intended to sell the youngster to a childless couple, the 59-year-old claimed.

But he believes the extensive media coverage highlighting a distinctive mark in Madeleine’s eye made it impossible to sell her.

Ralphs fears they felt they had no choice but to ‘dispose’ of Madeleine after they kidnapped her while her parents were out with friends dubbed ‘The Tapas Seven’.

He took his suspicions to police in both Portugal and the UK immediately after Madeleine’s disappearance.

But he still doesn’t know if they ever used the information in their investigations – and he’s not alone.

Brueckner was named as the chief suspect in the case by German prosecutors in 2020, more than 13 years after Madeleine vanished.

He’s never been charged in connection with the case and he denies having any involvement in her disappearance.

Brueckner is currently in a German prison for the rape of a 72-year-old woman in her Praia da Luz home in 2005.

He is on trial for five unrelated charges, including three of rape, alleged to have been committed in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.

All the attacks took place close to where Madeleine vanished in Praia da Luz in May 2007, it is claimed.

Brueckner spent 12 years living in and around the small resort town as part of the region’s drifter community.

Ralphs, a former community champion in Greater Manchester, ended up there after fleeing the UK in 2004 because a police blunder put his name in the hands of suspected criminals.

He started receiving death threats after giving police information on a gangland murder for which the suspects were cleared.

Once in Praia da Luz, he and his wife joined the drifter community, moving from place to place in a campervan.

Ralphs had seen Brueckner at car boot sales, town centres and camping spots on the region’s beaches.

They met through a mutual friend, a penniless man who lived in a hidden encampment with his wife, children and Brueckner in Carrapateira – 10 miles from Praia da Luz.

After spending a night sitting around a campfire drinking beers alongside their families, the mutual friend told Ralphs about Brueckner’s plan.

‘We sat by the fire until the early hours of the morning, and that’s when [John] started to cry and confess’, Ralphs told MailOnline.

‘[He] told me Christian was planning to take a child from Praia da Luz. He then clarified it was not ransom, but that it was to take a child to sell to a German couple who could not have children of their own.

‘He assured me the child would not be harmed.’

The friend asked Ralphs to keep it a secret, telling him: ‘Christian knew many people who will pay good money for a child who cannot give birth, and that the child would be taken from a rich family with more than one child [of their own] so the parents would not grieve as badly.’

He tried to convince his friend to stay away from the criminal world, even offering to train him in his work fixing caravan satellites so he wouldn’t be part of Brueckner’s plot.

But they never spoke of it again. A week later, Madeleine was gone.

Ralphs was visiting his dad in Stockport when the news broke.

‘First thing I said was “Oh for f*** sake”. My dad asked what’s the matter, and I told my dad,’ he said.

Keen to avoid dealing with police in Manchester again, he travelled to Workington in Cumbria and delivered a statement informing them of the plans and that Brueckner worked at Ocean Club, Ralphs said.

He also gave Cumbria Police a hand-drawn map of the teepee camp in Portugal, urging them to pass it to Portuguese officials searching for Madeleine.

Cumbria Police said it had no record of Ralphs’ statement from 2007.

Ralphs returned to Portugal days later to look for his friend at the encampment only to find all but a bamboo cage destroyed by fire.

He found the surviving item ‘unusual because the cage wasn’t there before’.

After searching other beaches, he found another mutual acquaintance, a French man who informed him their friend had left him his dog as he was going to Africa.

He gave his information directly to the Portuguese police but was told his friend claimed not to know him and that he’d unlikely been involved because he had a family of his own.

Ralphs was ‘gobsmacked’ to then run into an apron-clad Brueckner near Ocean Club, where police were interviewing all staff members.

Brueckner, however, may have slipped under their radar because he worked there off the books.

When Brueckner was named a suspect in 2020, Ralphs went back to British and Portuguese police but both told him they didn’t have his original statements from 2007.

Ocean Club did not respond to MailOnline’s requests for comment.

A fresh flurry of calls and tips has flowed towards investigators since Brueckner appeared in a German court last week.

One of the rapes he is on trial for was so brutal his victim feared the knife-armed Brueckner would behead her, the court in Braunschweig heard.

The other two rape attacks were allegedly committed against an elderly woman in her 70s and a girl aged 14.

Brueckner will not respond to any of the charges he faces.

His lawyer Friedrich Fülscher dismissed the evidence as ‘abysmal’ and said: ‘The defendant is using his right to remain silent.’

‘Our client has been subject to media attention, he has been accused of kidnapping and killing Madeleine McCann by members of the media and prosecutors, without evidence,’ he added.

‘We are not dealing with the worst criminal story of the post-war period but it will be hard for the court to put it out of their minds.’

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Wildfires in Portugal have forced the evacuation of hundreds of people from local towns and dozens of tourists from hotels.

More than 1,400 residents of the southern town of Odemira were asked to leave yesterday, as around 800 firefighters fought the spread of the blaze.

So far, nine personnel from the fire teams have been injured while tackling the flames, which are quickly spreading south towards the Algarve.

On Monday, Portugal’s hottest temperature of the year was recorded in Santarém, north-east of Lisbon, where the heat reached 46.4C.

Weather forecasters predict much of the Iberian peninsula will be hit by temperatures of 40C or more this week.

The Odemira fire has destroyed around 16,600 acres of land, with the town’s mayor Helder Geurreiro describing the situation as ‘critical, difficult, and complex’.

Four hotels and a campsite in the area have been evacuated, leaving more than 100 tourists searching for somewhere new to stay.

Civil Protection secretary of state Patricia Gaspar told a news conference: ‘The weather conditions we are going to experience in the coming days means any small occurrence [fire] could become a big one.’

The Portuguese national weather agency IPMA has put around half of the country at the highest warning level for rural fires, including most of the central and north-east regions as well as the far south.

Another wildfire in the Castelo Branco area at the weekend was tackled by more than 1,100 firefighters with the help of 14 water-carrying aircraft.

Smoke from the blaze drifted 60 miles to the Fátima Sanctuary where Pope Francis was addressing pilgrims on Saturday.

Many places in southern Europe have been affected by wildfires in recent weeks as blistering heatwaves continue to linger.

Almost 2,500 acres of land were burned over the weekend in Spain, from the south-western city of Cadiz to the region of Catalonia in the north-east.

And last month, fires on the Greek island of Rhodes required the evacuation of more than 20,000 locals and holidaymakers – the biggest such effort ever undertaken in the country.

The ‘El Niño’ phenomenon has exacerbated the worsening effects of climate change this year, forcing temperatures up close to European records.

Impacts have been felt around the planet, with forest fires also spreading widely in North America.

On July 27, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres declared the era of global warming had come to an end and the ‘era of global boiling has arrived’.

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