COPS in Portugal have launched a "cold case" review into the disappearance of Maddie McCann. 

A new team of officers is sifting through thousands of pages of files.

It comes nearly four years after the heavily criticised original probe was officially shelved. The search for new leads will boost the hopes of Madeleine's parents Gerry and Kate, who have never given up praying she will be found.

Detectives from the northern city of Porto, led by top cop Helena Monteiro, are working with a Scotland Yard team set up last May to review the case.

Some of the British officers have made several trips to Portugal and Spain and they talked to private detectives hired by Gerry and Kate, both 43 and doctors from Rothley, Leics.

Madeleine was nearly four when she vanished from the family's holiday apartment in Praia da Luz on the Algarve on May 3, 2007. Her parents were dining with friends nearby.

The new review does not mean the inquiry is officially reopened. A Portuguese police spokesman said: "Only our attorney general's office can order the reopening of a case and it would only do that if there was strong new evidence."

But the McCanns' Portuguese lawyer Rogerio Alves called the new move a "very positive sign".

He said fresh information might have "put police on the trail of something specific".

Mr Alves said: "More than anything Kate and Gerry want to discover what happened to their daughter, while harbouring the hope of finding her alive."

n.parker@the-sun.co.uk