HALT: Cops yesterday suspend the dig for fear of tainting evidence.
The dig for possible remains of 6-year-old Etan Patz in a SoHo basement was put on hold yesterday because of the nasty weather — as the lawyer for a new leading suspect compared the case to that of Trayvon Martin.
Investigators halted excavation around 2 p.m. as heavy rains fell on the green tent erected outside 127 Prince St., where FBI and NYPD probers had been tearing up the basement in hope of finding new clues in the little boy’s 1979 disappearance.
The work halt came a day after reports that probers had discovered a possible blood stain on a concrete cinder block in the basement. The stain was found after investigators sprayed Luminol, which can detect the presence of old blood, in the area.
The piece of concrete was removed for further tests.
A source told The Post that the search was stopped over concern that potential evidence being brought up from the basement could be compromised if it got wet in the downpour.
FBI spokesman Peter Donald cited “operational reasons’’ for the suspension, declining to elaborate. He said the search would resume today. Earlier yesterday, Donald had been optimistic about the progress of the search, which began Thursday. “We’re about 50 percent done,” he said.
Investigators will “painstakingly” sift through the debris and send anything of interest to an FBI lab in Quantico, Va., he said.
In 1979, the basement was the domain of Othniel Miller, a now-75-year-old handyman who did odd jobs around the Patz neighborhood. Cops interviewed Miller during the initial search for Etan after noticing freshly poured concrete on the basement floor, but they never dug it up.
Miller’s lawyer, Michael Farkas, yesterday said his client has been falsely maligned and accused — and likened the release of “unconfirmed information” to Florida’s Trayvon Martin shooting case.
“Mr. Miller decries these efforts to sully his good reputation and destroy his family,’’ Farkas said. “He has absolutely no responsibility for the terrible tragedy that befell young Etan Patz, and he grieves for Etan’s fate, as all New Yorkers have for decades.”
Meanwhile, a retired NYPD detective who worked the Patz case in the 1990s said he’s not optimistic about the basement search.
“Are they going to find something? I give it a 10 percent chance,” he said. “But I will never say that they are going in the wrong direction. As a detective, you always trace any lead you get.”
The retired cold-case cop said the search for Etan had led probers to several locations — first to a home in Vermont where pedophiles lived and then to a private house in Westchester County where, a jailhouse snitch told cops, the child was murdered.
The snitch then told cops that the child was buried on a large tract of private land upstate.
Police had been tipped off to the informant by true-crime writer Maury Terry, who had been talking with another snitch and was told by that source about the possible new Etan angle.
New York cops grilled the informant for hours, the detective recalled. By the time cops found the house more then a decade after Patz had disappeared, it had changed owners. No charges were ever filed. “We didn’t have enough probable cause, and we didn’t have corroboration of [all the snitch’s] statements,” he said.
Another person questioned in the case is Jesse Snell, who had worked with Miller and was seen in the SoHo building the day Etan disappeared, NBC reported.
Additional reporting by Don Kaplan and Antonio Antenucci