Missing UK girl's parents discuss new documentary

LONDON (Reuters) - The parents of a British child missing in Portugal since May are holding talks with broadcasters about a second TV documentary on their daughter's disappearance, a spokesman for the couple said on Saturday.

Kate and Gerry McCann, whose daughter Madeleine disappeared during a family holiday, hope the documentary will put pressure on European countries to adopt an alert system similar to one used in the United States to provide rapid notification to all states when a child goes missing.

The AMBER system, standing for America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response, is named after Amber Hagerman, a Texas girl kidnapped and murdered in 1996.

The McCanns are unhappy that, when the youngster went missing just before her fourth birthday in the resort of Praia da Luz, Spanish border officials were not informed by their Portuguese counterparts until 12 hours later.

"We've talked to a few broadcasters and one or two are minded to look at it," the McCann's spokesman Clarence Mitchell told Reuters of the documentary proposal. "We're not selling Kate and Gerry -- we're trying to produce something positive.

"If Madeleine were never found and if some sort of legacy for her was a system which would mean that no other family was ever in this terrible position again, then at least some good would have come out of this."

Mitchell confirmed the McCanns had been approached to do interviews with U.S. broadcasters Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters, but the couple's status as formal suspects in Portugal prohibited them from taking part.

In November the McCanns took part in a BBC documentary about the disappearance of the youngster.

Her parents believe she was abducted from their holiday apartment as they had dinner with friends at a nearby restaurant.

Despite a series of reported sightings and a huge police investigation, the child's whereabouts remains a mystery.