Taxi driver claims he saw Madeleine McCann with parents before dissapearance

Portuguese police will arrive in Britain within the next ten days to reinterview friends of Kate and Gerry McCann over the disappearance of their four-year-old daughter, Madeleine.

David Payne, Jane Tanner and her partner Russell O'Brien are set to be quizzed first in a last-ditch attempt by cops to crack the mystery. Police will then decide whether to requestion other members of the so-called Tapas Nine, it was claimed.

The news came as a Portuguese taxi driver told how he picked up Madeleine McCann with a blonde woman who looked like Kate McCann and three men including one who looked like suspect Robert Murat the night of her disappearance.

Antonio Castela, 67, said he dropped off the missing girl and her English-speaking mystery companions at an Algarve hotel and watched them drive off in a blue jeep.

Castela, a taxi driver for the past 17 years, said he picked the group up at at a taxi rank in Monte Gordo an hour's drive east of Praia da Luz where Kate and Gerry McCann were holidaying with their three children on the evening of May 3. He was certain about the timing, he said, as it was approaching the end of his shift.

He claimed Madeleine was wearing a pair of pink pyjamas and sat on the lap of one of the two men.

They asked him to drive them to the Apolo Hotel in the nearby town of Vila Real de Santo Antonio, a 15 minute drive from Portugal's southern border with Spain.

And the only one words one of the men uttered at the end of the two and a half mile journey was "How Much?" in English when it was time to pay, Mr Castela told Jornal do Algarve in an exclusive interview.

He told the paper the jeep the group got into in the hotel car park had a yellow UK-style number plate.

He is thought to have informed police after being told they were not staying at the hotel and seeing news of Madeleine's disappearance on TV.

Mr Castela is said to have picked up the group just after 8pm local time.

Madeleine's parents - official police suspects - first raised the alarm around 10pm although the last public sighting of Madeleine is believed to have been at least four hours earlier.