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Footage Shows Sniffer Dogs 'Pick Up Scent Of Blood' In Madeleine McCann Holiday Apartment

Footage Shows Sniffer Dogs 'Pick Up Scent Of Blood' In Madeleine McCann Holiday Apartment

The footage has appeared in the new Netflix documentary about the case

Claire Reid

Claire Reid

Footage showing the moment a trained sniffer dogs got the scent of blood in the holiday apartment that Madeleine McCann disappeared from has been shown in the new Netflix series about the case.

The evidence has recently resurfaced in The Disappearance Of Madeleine McCann series which landed on Netflix last week and aims to re-examine the case.


Months after the three-year-old vanished, Portuguese cops brought along two specially trained dogs to the Praia Da Luz apartment where she had been staying with her parents Kate and Gerry - who aren't suspects in the disappearance - and her twin brother and sister.

Two spaniels, named Eddie and Keela travelled to Portugal with handler Martin Grime and entered the apartment to see if they could pick up any smells.

Speaking on the documentary, Martin says: "When the dog indicates in the field, it will either be human decomposition or human blood.

"The human decomposition is very persistent, very pungent to the point where we've been able to locate, in blind searches, graves 40 years after the body has been removed and the body was only there for a short period of time.

Sniffer dogs were brought into the apartment months after Madeleine McCann disappeared.
Netflix

"With blood, crime scene investigators have been to the house and somebody has cleaned the blood up to the point you can no longer see it. That doesn't mean there isn't any there to find.

"It might drip through the gap and run around the back of the floorboard, but odour will still be coming through the gap in the floorboards and the dog will pick it up and respond to it."

Which means that the dogs could have been picking up the scent of blood from a long time before the McCanns stayed.

Journalist Robbyn Swan said that Eddie's 'behaviour changed the moment he came through the door'.

The clip shows Eddie wandering around the room, sniffing, before going over to a wardrobe and then turning to his handler and barking. He barks again when he sniffs behind a couch.

Keela, who was trained to alert her handler only when she smelt human blood, entered alone later and she too stopped in the same spot behind the couch.

Both dogs were then brought out to a Renault Scenic, which the McCanns had hired on their holiday, and they signalled that they had smelt blood and corpse odour inside.

When asked about the dogs back in 2008, dad Gerry said: "I can tell you that we've obviously looked at the evidence about cadaver dogs and they're incredibly unreliable."

Featured Image Credit: Netflix

Topics: TV and Film, Netflix, Madeleine McCann