BRITAIN: It was 3.40 p.m., at the end of the 13th day of the Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman investigation, and at Soham Village College in Cambridgeshire, England. Sarah Hall and Nick Hopkins, report from Cambridgeshire.
The girls' parents had given an emotional press conference, and in the school hall, the scene of each day's police update, reporters were completing their stories in time for early Friday deadlines, and before being thrown out by the caretaker.
Outside in the blistering sunshine, TV trucks continued copying videotapes of a televised appeal by Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager. Those journalists and camera crews who were loitering around were speculating on what the police might mean when they spoke of pursuing "significant new leads". At the end of a week which had seen an apparent trail of false clues, no one was expecting to see evidence of those leads quite so soon.
At the far corner of Soham Village College, two unmarked cars carrying four plainclothes policemen pulled up in front of the caretakers' modern detatched home and knocked on the door.
Mr Ian Huntley (28) and his girlfriend, Ms Maxine Carr (25) calmly agreed to go with detectives to separate police stations to give witness statements explaining what they were doing on the evening of August 4th and walked out into the sunshine. As the cars drew away, a couple of reporters looked over, and a single photographer took a picture.
Ten minutes later, the news spread that Det Chief Insp Andy Hebb, the man handling an investigation, and a recently appointed PR guru, had arrived at the college and would be giving a statement.
In measured tones and understated police jargon, the detective relayed the news: a man and a woman had been taken in for questioning, and a search team was about to start a detailed examination of their house and the college.
As police officers surged in to cordon off the area, camera crews and photographers, frantically snapping, were ushered out.
As two constables stood outside the tape marking out Mr Huntley's home, the town of Soham was shaken by the realisation that one of its own was being questioned.
Shortly after 6 p.m. four police vans arrived at the house and nine police scene-of-crime forensic officers entered the two-storey building to begin the search operation.
They were expected to undertake a thorough search of the building, although a police spokeswoman refused to say how detailed the search would be.
Ms Carr had been the teaching assistant in the girls' class until July and had been so liked by Holly that she had cried when Ms Carr left her class and given her a poem.
Mr Huntley, who had stood watching as the girls' parents made an emotional appeal to the abductor at a press conference yesterday morning, had joined in the search for them the night they went missing; had attended a community meeting on Thursday; had spoken to GMTV yesterday about how "gutted" he was by their disappearance; and had been the last known person to speak to them.
Last night Ms Christine Dobson (32) told of how he had supervised the children's detention at school and had been viewed by children as "hip".
"He came across as really friendly to the children, and they all talked about him. He helped in the search on the night the girls disappeared," she said.
The day after the disappearance, he had shown people around the Village College playing fields, pinpointing where they should be looking. "I am completely gobsmacked," Ms Dobson added. - (Guardian Service)