Revealed: The remote Moroccan town that could hold the key to finding Madeleine

Beggars lie in the shade outside the run-down cafes and shops that line the dusty streets of Karia Ba Mohamed, which nestles in the mountains near the city of Fes.

Far from the tourist traps of the country's north coast, Karia is a working-class farming town where Western faces are rarely seen.

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Water is in short supply, leaving the stray dogs and exhausted donkeys to go thirsty. Rubbish is strewn everywhere.

Yet this shabby enclave is now the focus of the hunt for four-year-old Madeleine.

Detectives from the Metodo 3 investigating team - the Spanish private detective agency hired at great expense by the McCanns to trace their daughter - claim they were phoned by a schools inspector from Karia, who said he had potentially crucial information.

He told them he had seen Madeleine, and his story is said to be backed up by several others.

The trail to Karia began a month ago when Naoual Malhi, a Spanish woman of Moroccan origin, claimed she saw a child with a striking resemblance to Madeleine in the Moroccan coastal resort of Findeq.

She sought the help of a police chief she knew in Fes, and thousands of posters of Madeleine were distributed in the area, urging people to contact Metodo 3 investigator Antonio Jiminez with any information.

As a result, Mrs Malhi says Mr Jiminez was contacted by the education inspector from Karia who told how a child with a striking resemblance to Madeleine had been seen in the town.

The claims prompted a flurry of door-to-door inquiries last week by Karia's small police force who, like most Moroccan forces, have a dossier on Madeleine.

For officers used to dealing with petty car crime and stolen mobile phones, it was a period of high drama, but they drew a blank.

They are now convinced that Madeleine is not in the town and have hit out angrily at what they perceive to be slurs on their ability.

The unnamed education inspector - who, according to newspaper reports, is now on holiday - is said to have claimed that 15 of his neighbours all backed his story.

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He is alleged to have told detectives that Madeleine was living on the outskirts of the community with a Berber woman, aged about 40, and a girl in her mid teens.

Karia's police chief insisted his officers had conducted a thorough search of the sprawling town's 2,000 houses, but admitted the surrounding countryside was harder to monitor.

About 130,000 people live in the area around Karia, yet just 18,000 are in the centre.

Here, everyone knows each other. There are no hotels, no town hall or council buildings, and youngsters who grow up here nearly always stay for life.

The police chief, who refused to give his name, angrily refuted claims that Madeleine was there, and instead cruelly suggested she was dead and blamed her distraught parents for what had happened.

The overweight, bald officer also boasted that there was no crime in Karia.

Yet, as he spoke, three young Moroccan men were sweating in an airless, filthy cell just yards away.

He said: 'She is not here. We have checked for her. Why would she be here? We would know if she was. We would have been told by the people.

'In cases like this you always must look at the parents. There are lots of hypotheses going round about them. We are astonished that we have been brought into this. It is incredible. The truth is she is probably not alive and if she is, she is not here.

'We have a dossier on her and we have nothing to hide. It is the parents who are hiding things. Why are they not still coming to Portugal to look for their daughter? Morocco doesn't need this. We have no crime and nothing like this.'

Meanwhile, six months exactly since Madeleine's disappearance, an emotional statement by Kate McCann was read at a service in the church in Praia Da Luz where she sought solace in the days and weeks that followed.

Mrs McCann told how she and her husband Gerry prayed every day that their 'little ray of sunshine' would be back soon.

Susan Hubbard, wife of the vicar the McCanns turned to after Madeleine vanished, fought back tears as she read Kate's message to well-wishers: 'Madeleine is one of many children cruelly taken from their families. Words will never be adequate to describe how much we miss and love her and the void in our lives has not lessened since the day she went missing.

'We continue to pray to God that good will triumph over evil, that hope will replace despair.'