McCanns seek EU child kidnap alert system

By Darren Ennis

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The parents of missing girl Madeleine McCann urged the European Union on Thursday to implement a cross-border alert system for abducted children, similar to one used in the United States.

Kate and Gerry McCann -- whose daughter disappeared last May from her bed in a resort hotel in Portugal -- want the bloc's 27 governments to roll out an EU answer to the U.S. Amber Alert.

Named after Amber Hagerman, a nine-year-old taken and killed by her abductor, Amber Alert operates like a severe weather warning, with messages flashed on radio, TV and motorway signs when a child disappears.

"We have fire stations down the road in case there is a fire. We don't wait until the city is burnt to the ground before calling for the fire station, so why should this be any different," Gerry McCann told Reuters in an interview.

The McCanns are still official suspects in the case.

The alert system is credited with helping to find some 400 children abducted in the United States since 2003, most of them in the first 72 hours.

In Europe, where some 130,000 children go missing every year, only France and Belgium have such a system. The European Commission last year proposed an EU-wide phone hotline for missing children, but it has yet to be implemented by member states.

"In Belgium it took so many girls to go missing and be killed before there were nearly riots in the streets to make this happen," Gerry McCann said.