Portuguese police ignored 'kidnapper in the shadows' outside Madeleine's bedroom

Police failed to investigate a previous suspected abduction attempt from Kate and Gerry McCann's holiday apartment, it was disclosed yesterday.

A babysitter spotted a man lurking in the shadows outside apartment 5A while she was looking after a young girl inside.

But Portuguese police searching for missing Madeleine McCann dismissed her account as 'irrelevant' and refused to investigate.

The failure, one of a host of missed opportunities, was revealed in the mammoth files released last week.

It emerged as police in Belgium continued to trawl through CCTV footage from a bank in Brussels where a security guard reported seeing a girl resembling Madeleine last week.

The McCanns' private detectives are working on a theory that Madeleine was abducted and taken to Belgium on the orders of a paedophile gang who had seen a photograph of her taken by a 'spotter' in Portugal.

Family spokesman Clarence Mitchell said their detectives were working on all the missed clues in the police files.

He said: 'Kate and Gerry hoped from the outset that the police were following up every lead in the most thorough and professional manner possible. Where any information is found not to have been followed up, our investigators are working on it, all of it.'

The case files showed that Margaret Hall, a babysitter at the Mark Warner resort, was interviewed by detectives working for the McCanns from the Spanish-based agency Metodo 3 last year.

Praia da Luz: The apartment from where Madeleine went missing

They handed their report, marked 'Very Confidential', to the Portuguese police.

It said Miss Hall had been in apartment 5A with a young girl in September 2006  -  eight months before Madeleine's disappearance  -  when she heard a noise outside.

She went to investigate, the statement said, adding: 'In a dark area she noticed something was moving and thought it was a rat.

'She was shocked when, on closer examination, she saw it was the brown shoe of a man. She shouted and the man came out of the darkness, activating movement-sensitive lights. He walked towards her, saying "No, no".'

The incident happened on a Thursday night  -  the same night Madeleine was taken.

Madeleine's parents Kate and Gerry McCann pictured in Portugal last year

But an internal Portuguese police memo said the report 'seems to us to be out-dated and of no relevance to the material under investigation'.

Detectives also failed to question George Brooks, 61, from Liverpool, who reported seeing a couple carrying a child near the local marina only hours after Madeleine vanished.

A friend of the McCanns, of Rothley, Leicestershire, said last night: 'The way the Policia Judiciaria dismissed a lot of the leads is astonishing. At the moment Kate and Gerry are concentrating on the Belgium sighting, as it was the most recent.'

A guard at the KBC bank in Brussels says he saw a blonde, blue-eyed girl with a Moroccan-looking woman last Monday.

The McCanns now have detectives working around the world at a reported cost of £166,000 a month.

Among the possible sightings they are following up, also apparently ignored by the Portuguese, is one by a British yachtsman on the Caribbean island of Margarita last May.

Trevor Francis, 64, of Worthing, West Sussex, said: 'I saw the little blemish in her right eye. She was the absolute image of Madeleine.'

He said the girl was in a restaurant with three women who looked Spanish. She seemed 'sullen' and refused to eat.