Police on Wednesday found a 4-year-old girl who went missing from a campsite in Western Australia more than two weeks ago and reunited her with her parents.
“What a great day, we now have returned Cleo to her loving parents,’’ Western Australia Police Commissioner Chris Dawson told reporters.
“It is a really special day for Western Australia indeed, I know the nation is rejoicing over the fact that we’ve been able to conduct this operation, and we never gave up hope.’’
Showing a photo of Cleo waving and smiling from what looks like a hospital bed, Dawson said: “as you can see she’s alive, she’s safe, she’s back with mom and dad.’’
The girl was found in a locked house in the town of Carnarvon, some 900 kilometres north of Perth and about 75 kilometres south of where she went missing, police said.
Dawson said that at about 1am on Wednesday (1700 GMT Tuesday) four police officers broke down a door of the house and found her in a room.
“I just wanted to be absolutely sure that, it certainly looks like Cleo, I wanted to be sure it was her,’’ Detective Senior Sergeant Cameron Blaine, one of the four officers who found the girl, told journalists, saying he asked the girl her name three times.
“I asked a third time and then she looked at me and she said ‘my name is Cleo,’ and that was it,’’ Blaine recalled, adding that her parents were called shortly after that.
Dawson confirmed that police have taken a 36-year-old suspect into custody, saying he was “assisting police with our enquiries at the moment.’’
He described the suspect as a local man from Carnarvon.
It appears as if the events had not been planned but rather opportunistic, Detective Superintendent Rob Wilde said.
The girl was said to have vanished from a tent at the Blowholes campsite after the family arrived on Oct. 16.
The girl was last seen by her mother around 1:30 am that night.
Western Australia’s state government said that it had offered a 1 million Australian dollar (740,000-US-dollar) reward for information relevant to finding the girl.(dpa/NAN).
