How missing 4-year-old Cleo Smith was found by police

Police said "really important" information about a suspicious car pointed them in the right direction.

On Wednesday, four-year-old Cleo Smith, who had been missing for 19 days, was found after police forced their way into a locked house in Carnarvon, Western Australia. Cleo went missing from a campsite that she and her family had been staying at on 16 October. A 36-year-old man from the area is now in custody and is being questioned. https://twitter.com/WA_Police/status/1455784205548359682?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1455784205548359682%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.her.ie%2Fnews%2Fpolice-footage-shows-moment-missing-4-year-old-cleo-smith-found-538603 Criminologist Xanthe Mallett, of the University of Newcastle, told the New York Times that the chances of Cleo being found alive had been very low and that she had never seen such an outcome before. "The likelihood of her being recovered alive was very low and getting lower as the days passed," she said. “For a child to be taken and found well after nearly 19 days, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this kind of outcome." After 19 days of intense and rigorous search efforts, Cleo was returned to her family alive and well. "It was the hard work of the team that did it," said Police Commissioner Chris Dawson. "All that information, gathering it all, working through it, and finding that needle in that haystack." Here's what we know about how the police managed to locate the four-year-old. Cleo went missing on the first night of her family's holiday at the Quobba Blowholes campsite between the hours of 1.30AM and 6AM. Cleo was sleeping on an air mattress next to her younger sister's cot. Her mother, who was sleeping in the other room of the tent, woke up the next morning to find that Cleo was gone and the tent door had been left open. Due to the nature of Cleo's disappearance, police suspected an abduction had occurred. What happened next was a frantic search involving a task force of more than 100 officers. The search for the four-year-old covered  air, ground and sea. Police even scoured through hundreds of bags of rubbish along a 600 kilometre stretch of Western Australia. A reward of 1 million Australian dollars (€641,750) was offered in exchange for information that would lead authorities to Cleo.