The search continued as the summer progressed amid a wild media circus and with huge fundraising activities underway, the McCanns setting up Madeleine’s Fund on 15 May to raise cash to support further investigation and keep the profile of the case high, attracting generous donations from celebrities like Richard Branson, Simon Cowell, JK Rowling and Coleen Rooney. Scotland Yard would later come to dismiss the sighting as a red herring. The individual in question was spotted by Jane Tanner, one of the McCanns’ dining companions, who said she had seen a Mediterranean man with dark hair and beige trousers carrying a child close to the apartment when she went to check in on her own children. On 26 May, police issued a description of a suspicious man seen on the night of the girl’s disappearance. The police initially stated that they believed Madeleine was still alive and had been abducted from the room by a stranger as the parents described their “anguish and despair” over her vanishing, a worst fear realised for any parent.
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The Portuguese authorities would later attract criticism over their conduct in the crucial earliest hours of the investigation when the trail might still have been warm, accused of making rudimentary mistakes like failing to conduct a house-by-house search of every local residence or interview all of the other guests at the resort, acting slowly to erect roadblocks and potentially compromising forensic evidence at the crime scene through carelessness and incaution.