McCanns seek EU child kidnap alert system

|PIC1|The parents of missing girl Madeleine McCann urged the European Union on Thursday to implement a cross-border alert system for abducted children, similar to one used in the United States.

Kate and Gerry McCann - whose daughter disappeared last May from her bed in a resort hotel in Portugal - want the bloc's 27 governments to roll out an EU answer to the U.S. Amber Alert.

Named after Amber Hagerman, a nine-year-old taken and killed by her abductor, Amber Alert operates like a severe weather warning, with messages flashed on radio, TV and motorway signs when a child disappears.

"We have fire stations down the road in case there is a fire. We don't wait until the city is burnt to the ground before calling for the fire station, so why should this be any different," Gerry McCann told Reuters in an interview.

The McCanns are still official suspects in the case.

The alert system is credited with helping to find some 400 children abducted in the United States since 2003, most of them in the first 72 hours.

In Europe, where some 130,000 children go missing every year, only France and Belgium have such a system. The European Commission last year proposed an EU-wide phone hotline for missing children, but it has yet to be implemented by member states.

"In Belgium it took so many girls to go missing and be killed before there were nearly riots in the streets to make this happen," Gerry McCann said.

"So I hope we don't have to wait for people to take to the streets elsewhere before we can get EU countries to act."

Kate McCann said the chances of finding their daughter would have been higher if such a system was in place.

"Time is the enemy in the case of missing children," she said.

Portuguese police have asked the McCann's to return to the Algarve to stage a reconstruction of the events on May 3 when their daughter went missing.

Gerry McCann said the couple "need clarification first" before deciding whether to return to Portugal.

"We, we are looking for more information about what they are hoping to achieve with the re-enactment," he said.

"Obviously, anything that will go forward to, or help find Madeleine, we want to participate and assist in any way we can. But there are a number of unanswered questions exactly about what a re-enactment is, and what did it mean and what did it hope to achieve. There is a dialogue ongoing."

He said was still hopeful his daughter could be found.

"Absolutely. There is one thing from the States, where they got tremendous experience, is that children get recovered and the younger the child, the less likely that child is to have suffered serious harm," he said.