A senior Portuguese police officer has criticised Gerry McCann over fears his daughter's abductor was hidden in their apartment, it is reported.
Madeleine's father believes someone was hiding in her room when he went back to check on his children in the couple's holiday apartment in Praia Da Luz on the night of May 3.
But the head of Portugal's police federation, Carlos Anjos, said the claim was a "ridiculous episode" and accused Mr McCann of being "negligent".
"Since their daughter disappeared, Gerry and Kate have followed a strategy of almost daily announcements of new facts," he told Diaria de Noticas.
"Four months after his daughter's disappearance - a period in which he was interviewed various times by the Policia Judiciaria, he remembered that a man was hidden in his apartment where his three children were sleeping, at a time in which he went to check if the kids were OK.
"If he was suspicious that there was a man in the apartment, and then he calmly went to dinner, then words cannot describe how negligent he is as a father."
Clarence Mitchell, the family's spokesman, said Mr McCann's fears came to him only after Madeleine's abduction and Mr Anjos had "totally misunderstood" what he said. He told the Daily Telegraph: "This was in the original witness statement."
Now Madeleine's grandmother has repeated the abduction theory, saying she feared the youngster was drugged to stop her crying out for help.
Eileen McCann, 69, told the Daily Mirror: "I believe whoever took her gave her a drug. There is no way they carried her out of there without her waking.
"If she was taken when she was sleeping by somebody she did not know she would have screamed the place down."
