Madeleine web plea 'first in world'

Hundreds of thousands of internet users have watched a new video targeting the person hiding a guilty secret about what happened to Madeleine McCann.

Gerry McCann hailed the global online appeal as a "world first" and said he and his wife Kate were hopeful it would lead to a breakthrough in the search for their daughter.

The 60-second film - titled A Minute For Madeleine - was posted on the website of the UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) centre.

A spokeswoman for Ceop said the video "exploded" over the internet. It was watched by an average of 15,000 people an hour on Ceop's own homepage, and hundreds of thousands more saw it on other websites. Links to the film were also posted by hundreds of Twitter users, among them TV presenters Phillip Schofield and Jonathan Ross.

The viral internet appeal is aimed at persuading a friend or relative of the person responsible for Madeleine's disappearance to "do the right thing".

Mr McCann, 41, said: "We're optimistic that this message will get to them, it will cause them to wrestle with their conscience. But they may not give in to that conscience on the first viewing, it might be the second or third. I think that's another important bit of the internet here. The power of the internet is the persistence. We are hopeful. You would have to be living in another world not to see this message - that's what we're relying on."