Madeleine hunt turns to Balkans after girl is heard crying for 'Daddy'

Kate and Gerry McCann's private detectives have travelled to Bosnia-Herzegovina to investigate the new sighting, which is being treated as "an active line of the investigation".

The witness told police he was immediately suspicious as the "agitated and sobbing" blonde girl looked like missing Madeleine.

He said: "The instant I saw her my heart skipped a beat because it immediately struck me that she looked like Maddie McCann.

"I got very close to her, right up beside them, and was about to speak to the child when the man put his hand over her mouth and shoved her into the car.

"He was pushing her into the back-seat of a Volkswagen Golf and was yelling in some language I didn't understand that wasn't English.

"But my blood ran cold when I heard her cry: 'I want my Daddy'."

The witness, a father-of-six from Co Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, scribbled down the car's registration number as it sped away and went to try to report the incident to the local police in the town of Medjugorje.

They could not speak English, so he found a shopkeeper to translate his words and write them in Serbo-Croat.

Even then the police just "shrugged", he said, so he later phoned police in Ulster and the McCanns' confidential hotline about the sighting.

The witness said he was on holiday in Medjugorje with his wife and their two-year-old child on November 1 when he saw the girl with a couple in the square outside the Church of St James, which attracts Catholic pilgrims.

"From the minute I saw them there seemed to be something odd going on," he said.

"They both had a very swarthy complexion and the toddler they had with them was a blonde, fair child. She was wearing a little pink coat and was very agitated and sobbing."

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The man, who asked not to be identified, said he had not slept properly since the sighting because he believed the girl could have been missing Madeleine.

"If I'm right then her poor parents could be within reach of finding her," he said.

Mr and Mrs McCann, both aged 39, are "very grateful" to the man for reporting the sighting, family spokesman Clarence Mitchell said.

"We are checking the Bosnia sighting like all the rest. It is an active line of the investigation," he said.

Potential sightings have come in from all over the world since Madeleine went missing from Praia da Luz on May 3, including several in Spain, Morocco, Malta and Belgium, and detectives are also checking claims she could be in Saudi Arabia.