Further revelations have heightened police fears about the man, an immigrant thief killed in a tractor accident two years after Madeleine vanished.
Leading Portuguese daily paper Correio da Manha said the police profile identified the suspect as a worker who had been sacked by the Ocean Club, the Algarve holiday complex in Praia da Luz where Madeleine disappeared on May 3, 2007.
Portuguese officers are examining the possibility that the man, who has not been named by the authorities, may have kidnapped the three-year-old in an act of revenge against his former employers.
The suspect was a father-of-one who emigrated to Portugal from his native Cape Verde off west Africa and was convicted of theft in 1996.
The newspaper Correio da Manha claimed yesterday: “Portuguese police inspectors who studied the case and asked for its recent re-opening put together a profile of the suspect, who died aged 40 in 2009, and concluded the character traits they identified strengthened the possibility he could have been the author of the crime.”
The paper claimed the man had a past “marked by some episodes of violence” and had “suspicious behaviour with children” – but offered no more details.
It also claimed the man’s family had refused to help police.
Madeleine’s parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, from Rothley, Leics, are aware of the reports but continue to believe their daughter is alive and a separate exhaustive investigation by Scotland Yard detectives, codenamed Operation Grange, continues.
Portuguese detectives re-opened their investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance following a decision last month by the country’s Attorney General, more than five years after it was shelved. The suspect’s family yesterday threatened to sue the Portuguese state over leaks to the media, insisting he was innocent.
His brother-in-law, speaking outside his country home at the end of a dirt track a short drive from Praia da Luz, said: “It was a shock to us all when we read the police suspected my late brother-in-law of kidnapping and killing Madeleine.
He wasn’t named in the newspaper reports but we knew immediately who they were talking about.
“My brother-in-law was sacked from the Ocean Club and I can understand why the police would want to have a look at him, especially if they then discover he has a criminal conviction. But I strongly believe that if the police do consider he is a suspect in the Madeleine McCann case, they are looking at the wrong man.
“The idea he did it to get revenge on the Ocean Club makes no sense at all. It wasn’t as if what happened there with him losing his job destroyed his life. He got work elsewhere soon afterwards. He was working at the time he died.
“He is not around to defend his reputation so others have to do it for him.”
