A private detective, who disappeared after being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to search for Madeleine McCann, has been arrested in Oxford, media reports said on Wednesday.
The man, identified by The Sun as Kevin Halligen, is also wanted by American authorities on unrelated fraud charges.
Halligen, who runs a Washington-based private investigations company, was hired last year by the McCanns to search for their daughter Madeleine who went missing in Portugal in 2007, the paper said.
He later disappeared but was on Tuesday arrested at a plush Oxford hotel over an unpaid bill. He had been staying there for three months under a false name, the Sun said.
“We arrested a 48-year-old man yesterday morning at the Old Bank Hotel in Oxford. It was a discrepancy over his hotel bill,” Thames Valley Police said, without confirming his identity.
Halligen’s company, Oakley International, last year won a 500,000-pound contract, to look into possible CCTV sightings of Madeleine. The money came from publicly-donated funds to find the child who was snatched from a hotel in the Algarve in May 2007.
But after six months, the contract was dropped for lack of progress. Halligen’s firm had by this time been paid some 300,000 pounds.
Earlier this month, the US Department of Justice put out a warrant for Halligen who is accused of defrauding a London-based law firm out of 1.2 million pounds. He claimed the money was to help secure the release of two businessmen who were arrested in the Ivory Coast but allegedly used the money to buy himself a mansion.
Source: AFP
