A young woman who claimed to be Madeleine McCann has been convicted of harassing the missing toddler’s family.
However Julia Wandelt, 24, was cleared of stalking the couple.
A Polish national born three years after Madeleine, Wandelt said she suspected she had been abducted and brought up by a couple who were not her real parents.
She was having mental health issues at the time and had been abused by an elderly relative.
The relative looked like an artist’s drawing of a man who was once a suspect in the Madeleine case, which she stumbled across during internet research on missing children.
She went to Los Angeles and told a US TV chat show audience: “I believe I am Madeleine McCann.”
Wandelt claimed to have a blemish in the iris of her right eye, like Madeleine’s, and to resemble aged-progressed images of her.
Over three years, she attracted half a million followers on her Instagram account, iammadeleinemccan, and posted her claims on TikTok.
Police told her she was not Madeleine and ordered her not to approach her family, but she ignored the warning.
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