JOHANNESBURG (AP) – A South African man who was reunited with his kidnapped daughter after 17 years said on Tuesday that he would like to talk to Madeleine McCann’s parents.
Morne Nurse said he had never given up hope that his daughter was alive, and researched the case of the British girl who disappeared in Portugal in 2007, days before her fourth birthday.
“I’m trying to get a hold of the mother,” said Nurse, during a press conference shown on state broadcaster SABC. “What we wanted to tell them is that, never give up.”
The girl’s biological mother, Celeste Nurse, said “All they have to do is just believe and pray and have hope.”
The Nurses found their daughter last month, after their second daughter befriended a girl at school who looked remarkably like her. That friend turned out to be her big sister who was kidnapped in 1997. The girl, not named because she is a minor, was taken from her mother’s bedside in a Cape Town hospital at just three days old.