With the six months since Madeleine McCann went missing set to be marked tomorrow, there is fresh news and continuing hope as Spanish private detectives hired by parents Gerry and Kate McCann are now investigating a sighting in Morocco of a blonde girl with the same distinctive mark in one eye as missing daughter Madeleine, a family spokesman said.

Naoual Malhi, a Spanish woman of Moroccan origin, saw the child with a woman in the village of Fnidk on August 21.

She asked if she could share their taxi but the woman refused, and Ms Malhi later discovered that the pair had gone to the port of Hoceima.

She contacted Spanish police about six days later after seeing media reports suggesting the missing child could be in Morocco, McCann family spokesman Clarence Mitchell said.

Although sightings of blonde girls resembling Madeleine have been reported across Europe and Morocco, this one is especially significant because the child apparently had a mark on her iris.

But so far Metodo 3, the Spanish private detective agency hired by the McCanns, has failed to find the girl seen by Ms Malhi.

Mr Mitchell said: “We have looked at this and the police have looked at this, and we still don’t have Madeleine back.”

Yesterday Mr McCann returned to work as a consultant cardiologist at at Leicester’s Glenfield Hospital.

The heart specialist’s phased return began after nearly six months away.

He is starting on three half-days a week, splitting his time between assessing the results of MRI scans of patients and research for the British Heart Foundation.

Tomorrow, Mr McCann and his wife will attend a church service to mark six months since their daughter went missing from their holiday apartment in Praia da Luz.

(BMcC)