What has happened to little Typhaine

It has now been a week since five-year-old Typhaine Taton disappeared without trace while walking with her mother in broad daylight in the northern French town of Maubeuge - and there's still no sign of her.

Everyone surely remembers the case of Madeleine McCann, the British girl who disappeared in May 2007, a couple of days short of her fourth birthday, while on holiday with her parents in Portugal.

It was a story that made the world headlines for many months, and her whereabouts is still unknown.

Here in France there has also been a case of a little girl disappearing without any explanation, and the circumstances are just as extraordinary.

It's a story that has received national coverage but as French investigators have apparently had so little information to go on - just the statement of the mother - they still seem to be at as much of a loss as to what could have happened to the girl as they were last week when the local public prosecutor, Bernard Beffy, told reporters that they had no idea as to Typhaine's whereabouts.

"We don't know whether she's alive or dead and at the same time no hypothesis has been ruled out."

A week ago five-year-old Typhaine disappeared without trace while walking with her mother in the northern French town of Maubeuge.

According to Anne-Sophie Faucheur, the two of them were in the town centre last Thursday afternoon, her daughter roughly 50 metres ahead of her.

Typhaine turned the corner at the intersection of two roads and by the time Faucheur arrived her daughter was nowhere to be seen. She had "disappeared within the space of five seconds" was what she told police.

Faucheur, who finally broke her week-long silence at a news conference on Wednesday, told reporters that at first she had been convinced that Typhaine couldn't be very far.

"I looked around and then I started to panic," she said. And rather than ask passers-by or shopkeepers whether they had seen her daughter, she rang her partner, Nicolas Willot, who joined her in the town centre and together they went to the local police station to report Typhaine's disappearance.

Police opened an investigation and during the past week they have detained and questioned both Faucheur and Willot, later releasing them. Forensic and technical teams have searched the home the couple share with Typhaine and her two sisters.

The father of the five-year-old, François Taton, from whom Faucheur is estranged, has been questioned, as has his mother.

Pictures of the girl have been distributed, divers have searched the nearby river Sambre and a lake, sniffer dogs have been used, and pictures of the girl have been distributed.

And still there's apparently no clue as to what happened to Typhaine or where she could be.

Of course there are other details that have slowly made their way into the media and given rise to the inevitable conjecture.

Faucheur and Taton didn't have any sort of formal legal agreement as to who should have custody of the Typhaine and her older sister, Caroline.

Until January the five-year-old had been living with her father and attending a nearby primary school, but then reportedly Faucheur decided that Typhaine should come and live with her. Since then she has not been enrolled in any school.

Then there's the non-appearance of the Typhaine at the baptism of her one-year-old half-sister (the daughter of Faucheur and Willot) on June 13, with Faucheur claiming that she left had left her daughter alone at the home!

Such speculation that there is more to the fate of the five-year-old than simply having "disappeared within the space of five seconds" led Faucheur to hold Wednesday's news conference, where she once again repeated what she told the police and journalists before: her daughter had disappeared while the two of them were in the centre of Maubeuge.

"We feel completely powerless. There's an emptiness " she said.

"We don't know anything apart from the fact that we miss her and we are certain she will be found."