Blackpool mum 'cared for girls abandoned at holiday hotel' - and sets the record straight in face of rumours

Amanda Wignall, from central Blackpool, spoke to a national newspaper after returning from Majorca, where she said she stepped in to help two young girls left to fend for themselves, but says her parents are now getting calls asking if she had been arrested.

The 37-year-old, whose trip was a surprise for her birthday, said: “They are seeing the pictures and headlines and assuming it’s me.

“I don’t even drink. I was the rescuer.”

Amanda said she was amongst a number of holidaymakers who looked after the girls after seeing them alone after flying to Palma with her husband and four-year-old son on Sunday.

Following a call to Spanish police when hotel security staff intervened, the youngsters’ mum and step-dad were reportedly arrested, with the girls taken into care of the local social services.

Speaking to the MailOnline, Amanda said: “It could’ve been another Maddie McCann story, they didn’t know how much danger they were in.

“It’s absolutely disgusting, they don’t deserve to have children, let alone take them abroad.”

But, despite the article clearly stating Amanda was the one helping and not one of the girls’ parents, she said people are still getting confused.

“I have had messages from people asking if I have got back to the UK and have my kids back,” she said.

“I have had people ringing my parents asking if I have been arrested. This is people in the town jumping to that assumption.

“They are going around spreading gossip.”

Amanda, who approached The Gazette and said she was not paid to tell her story, said she has also been targeted by online trolls who accused her of ‘cashing in on the girls’ misery’, and said she has even been approached while on the school run.

She added: “I wake up every morning really angry at what is going on, or really sad about what happened to those girls. Every morning is horrendous.

“I don’t want to go out and face people because I don’t know what they think.”

In a statement to the national press, a spokesman for the National Police said a officers ‘arrested a British couple who were on holiday as the suspected authors of a crime of child abandonment’.

He said the couple was usually drunk’, and added: “After security staff warned them about their illegal behaviour, they convinced another British couple who they didn’t know, to look after their children while they went drinking in different bars in the resort. They would return totally drunk.”