(CNN) — Four-year-old Cleo Smith has been found alive 18 days after she went missing from her tent during a family camping trip in northwest Australia.
Police found the little girl at a locked home in the small town of Carnarvon, Western Australia, just after midnight Wednesday local time.
A 36-year-old local man with “no family connection” is in police custody, WA Police Commissioner Chris Dawson told ABC Radio Perth.
A police video caught the moment an officer picked up the child and asked her, “What’s your name?”
“When she said, ‘My name is Cleo,’ I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house,” Deputy Police Commissioner Col Blanch told 6PR radio.
“I have seen seasoned detectives openly crying with relief. I am speechless, which is very rare. … This is something we all hoped in our hearts, and it has come true.”
“Our family is whole again,” mother Ellie Smith wrote Wednesday on Instagram.
A massive police search was triggered by the 4-year-old’s disappearance from a remote campsite at Quobba Blowholes, about 600 miles north of Perth and 40 miles from Carnarvon, where the Smith family lives.
The house where she was eventually found is just a short drive from the Smith home.
The suspected kidnapper was not in the house at the time of the raid, Blanch said. Police don’t suspect anyone else of being involved, they said.
Ellie Smith last saw Cleo, her eldest daughter, around 1:30 a.m. on Oct. 16. The girl had woken up in their tent and asked for a drink of water, and then both went back to sleep.
A partition divided the tent into two areas; Cleo’s parents were in one, and Cleo and her baby sister in the other.
When Ellie Smith next woke at 6 a.m., the 4-year-old was missing, and her sleeping bag was gone, too.
The case had been compared to that of Madeleine McCann, a 3-year-old British girl who disappeared from her bed at a Spanish resort in 2007 while her parents were having dinner. She has never been found.
Less than a week into the search, the Western Australia government offered a reward of 1 million Australian dollars ($750,000 U.S.) for information leading to Cleo’s discovery.
On Wednesday, police said it was unlikely anyone would claim the million dollar reward, as Cleo’s rescue was the result of painstaking work by the police.The-CNN-Wire
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