Madeleine web plea 'first in world'

Gerry McCann hailed the global online appeal as a "world first" and said he and his wife Kate were hopeful it would lead to a breakthrough in the search for their daughter.

The 60-second film - titled A Minute For Madeleine - was posted on the website of the UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) centre.

A spokeswoman for Ceop said the video "exploded" over the internet. It was watched by an average of 15,000 people an hour on Ceop's own homepage, and hundreds of thousands more saw it on other websites. Links to the film were also posted by hundreds of Twitter users, among them TV presenters Phillip Schofield and Jonathan Ross.

The viral internet appeal is aimed at persuading a friend or relative of the person responsible for Madeleine's disappearance to "do the right thing".

Mr McCann, 41, said: "We're optimistic that this message will get to them, it will cause them to wrestle with their conscience. But they may not give in to that conscience on the first viewing, it might be the second or third. I think that's another important bit of the internet here. The power of the internet is the persistence. We are hopeful. You would have to be living in another world not to see this message - that's what we're relying on."

Ceop head Jim Gamble said he wanted the video to become so widely distributed online that it came up every time the person in question searched for information about the Madeleine case. "Our pursuit of this individual should be relentless. If we get sufficient depth of support from the public across the globe, it will not go away," he said.

The video includes two new digitally-aged pictures of how Madeleine might look now aged six. In one of them she has dark brown hair and tanned skin in case she has been living in north Africa or southern Europe.

Mrs McCann, 41, said it was "very strange" to see the images for the first time. "It's not particularly pleasant because obviously it's not the Madeleine that we remember," she said. "It's really just to enable people to remember that Madeleine may have dark hair now, she might have darker skin, and to help them not just to imagine her as a little blonde girl."

Madeleine was nearly four when she went missing from her family's holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in Portugal on May 3, 2007 while her parents dined with friends nearby. Despite a massive police investigation and huge publicity worldwide, she has not been found.