The holiday apartment from which three-year-old Madeleine McCann vanished has been bought by a British woman for half the asking price.
Records show that widow Kathleen Macguire-Cotton paid £113,000 ($141,000) for the ground floor property in Praia da Luz on Portugal’s Algarve. It had been on sale for £255,000 ($313,000) – £50,000 less than similar apartments on sale in the Ocean Complex.
According to reports, Mrs Macguire-Cotton, a widow, secretly bought the apartment “years ago”.
Madeleine, also from the UK, vanished from the apartment after being left there to sleep on the evening of May 3, 2007 by her parents, Gerry and Kate. They were eating dinner with friends in a restaurant 180 yards away. Madeleine’s younger twin siblings were also asleep in the apartment at the time.
Police believe the toddler – who would now be 13 – may have been kidnapped after a break-in went wrong but in the absence of any proof, dozens of different theories about what happened that night continue to circulate. The mystery has been described as “the most heavily reported missing-person case in modern history”.
Mrs Macguire-Cotton revealed she is often offered money by tourists to look inside the two-bedroom apartment. Some local tour guides are even said to run trips around Praia da Luz which focus on Madeleine’s disappearance, taking in the apartment and the restaurant her parents were eating at on the night she went missing.
The Briton, who is in her 60s, said she always turns them away, explaining: “I’ve been offered money by the whole world but I’m not interested.”