French police rescued an abducted 12-year-old Scottish girl after she was snatched from her holiday villa and taken to an airport by an internet pervert.
French police rescued an abducted 12-year-old Scottish girl after she was snatched from her holiday villa and taken to an airport by an internet pervert.
The child from Glasgow was lured from her hotel by the 41-year-old Belgian man while staying with her family in the southern French resort of Saint-Cyr.
She had met him in an internet chatroom four months earlier, police said.
The man, who claimed to be 28, arrived at her hotel last Friday and took her to Marseille airport, telling her he was taking her to Spain.
But once at airport security, the man realised the girl had no passport, so abandoned her and boarded the plane to Madrid. After being discovered alone and sobbing by airport police, the girl told them a man had been trying to take her to Spain.
But when he realised she had no identity papers, he fled through security alone, she told police.
Officers then boarded the plane and arrested the man just 10 minutes before it was due to take off for Madrid.
Police said the girl had been missing for about three hours and her parents had not reported her missing by the time she was found.
A French police spokesman said: "It was the middle of the day and her mother and father assumed she was out playing.
"In fact she had left in a taxi with a man she had met in a chatroom.
"Over the previous four months she had been chatting to a man who she believed was 28 years old.
"She had told him where and when she was going on holiday and he had clearly followed her there."
Police said the girl had met the man on a social networking site called Gaia.com, which describes itself as "an online gathering of environmentally and spiritually conscious people".
The spokesman added: "When we notified the parents, they were horrified to learn their daughter had been found at Marseille airport.
"She told the aiport police the man was aboard a flight to Spain.
"The plane was halted for about 10 minutes before take-off and a 41-year-old Belgian suspect was found on board."
Frontier police arrested the man, who at first claimed to be the child's uncle.
He was held in custody over the weekend before being charged with child abduction by a judge in Aix-en-Provence on Monday.
The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was returned to her family at their hotel.
The abduction follows suggestions that a campaign by the parents of four-year-old missing girl Madeleine McCann may bear fruit.
Kate and Gerry McCann have campaigned for a UK and mainland European system to track children who have been abducted.
The system will mirror the Amber Alert system in America, where descriptions of abducted children are flashed on radio, television, motorway gantries and advertising hoardings within hours of them being snatched.
The scheme was introduced in Texas in 1996, following the kidnapping and murder of nine-year-old Amber Hagerman and has led to the safe recovery of 446 children. It has also been adopted in France and Belgium.
It is designed to spread information, including up to date photographs of a missing child, as widely as possible during the critical first six hours following an abduction when they are at greatest risk.
Last month, Scottish lorry driver Robert Williams, 49, who slept with a 15-year-old British girl he met online before fleeing with her to France, was jailed for five years.
He met the girl in a chatroom, claimed to be 19 and arranged to meet her, taking her from her Lincolnshire home to a hotel in London.
