A distant relative of British schoolgirl Shannon Matthews is due before a court, charged with her abduction and imprisonment.
Michael Donovan, 39, will appear before Dewsbury Magistrates' Court accused of abducting the nine-year-old and holding her captive for more than three weeks, the crown prosecution service said.
Matthews was found on Friday under a bed in a house just a mile from her home in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. The girl had gone missing on February 19 after a swimming trip. She was found, apparently unhurt, in the base section of a divan bed.
Donovan, formerly known as Paul Drake, is an uncle of Matthews' stepfather Craig Meehan. His scheduled appearance in court comes as police were again forced to defend their handling of the case, after heavy criticism from some critics.
The head of the West Yorkshire force, Norman Bettison, said the inquiry's scale had been "phenomenal and unprecedented". She was in the safe hands, he said, as police continued the delicate task of talking to Matthews to find out what happened to her between her disappearance from the gates of her school in Dewsbury on February 19 and her dramatic rescue 24 days later. She was unlikely to be reunited with her mother for some time, he added, as she was being interviewed in short bursts.
Bettison told reporters late yesterday that his officers had interviewed about 6,000 people and searched 3,000 houses. He said he was amazed to have to defend his force publicly over the time it took to find the missing girl.
At one stage, about a tenth of its officers were involved in the investigation, making it one of the biggest in the area since the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry in the late 1970s.
He rejected suggestions that his force had bungled the case and branded critics fantasists for suggesting police had ignored their vital clues. He singled out particular praise for the detectives who found her, Paul Kettlewell and Nick Townsend. "Given that was the 700th action they had undertaken since the start of the investigation, I think it is amazing and it is question of pride for me that they then started to make inquiries of neighbours," he said.
"The people that might have been quoted in the press as having given the police the whole jigsaw puzzle - the box lid - are fantasising."
Some critics have said she would have been found more quickly if they had used a so-called amber alert scheme, under which local radio and TV stations broadcast alerts about abducted children as soon as possible, including any details of suspected vehicles, for maximum early publicity.