The search is entering its fourth day. (Supplied: NT Police Force)

Late on Saturday night, a five-year-old girl vanished from a home in an Alice Springs town camp, sparking a desperate search.

In the days since, as Sharon Granites’s disappearance has made national headlines and the search for her has expanded, a clearer picture of what happened that night has emerged.

Here’s what we know so far.

The house where Sharon Granites was last seen in Old Timers town camp, in Alice Springs. (ABC News: Will Green)

Saturday was a warm autumn day in Alice Springs, when Sharon and her mother visited a home at the Old Timers / Ilyperenye Aboriginal camp on the outskirts of the regional town.

The town camp is a small community, with only nine households and about 40 residents, which is maintained by the local Aboriginal corporation Tangentyere Council.

Old Timers town camp is a small community situated between the Alice Springs town centre and the suburb of Kilgariff. (ABC News Graphics: Jessica Henderson)

Police say Sharon and her mother were visiting the home of some people they knew well, to do some Saturday laundry.

As the evening went on, police say a party was held at the house for a “social occasion”, with several people in attendance.

One of those people was Jefferson Lewis, a 47-year-old man who was staying at the home at Old Timers after having been released from prison six days prior.

Police are searching for Jefferson Lewis in relation to the alleged abduction. (Supplied: NT Police Force)

At some point that night, police say they visited the town camp for an unrelated incident and captured footage of Mr Lewis on officers’ body-worn cameras.

The grainy photos from that night’s footage show Mr Lewis wearing a bright yellow shirt and a grey and yellow cap.

Police say their interaction with Mr Lewis that night was “fortuitous” and that “no offence” had occurred at that time, with police leaving the location shortly after.

Jefferson Lewis was at Old Timers town camp the night Sharon went missing. (Supplied: NT Police Force)

But at 11pm that night, police say Mr Lewis was seen by those in the area for the last time, and he was with a little girl believed to be Sharon.

“He was last seen with the little girl holding hands,” police said on Tuesday.

Just before 11:30pm, Sharon was put into bed by family at the house that she and her mother were visiting. She was wearing a dark blue short-sleeved T-shirt with a white ring stripe around the neck and cuffs and a pair of black boxer-style underwear.

That was the last time anyone saw her.

A little later, Sharon’s mother went to check on her little girl in the bedroom she was sleeping in and found that she had vanished.

At 1:30am, the distraught mother called NT Police and reported Sharon missing.

Police now believe that Mr Lewis “led that little girl away” from the home.

From a young girl who ‘wandered off’ to a suspected abduction

After arriving at Old Timers town camp in the early hours of Sunday morning, police spent hours conducting a search of the area.

Police initially told the media they believed Sharon might have “wandered off” through an unlocked door.

Throughout the rest of the day, a search party of more than 50 police officers, as well as members of the NT Emergency Service, looked for the five-year-old in the surrounding area, including along the dry Todd River, which is adjacent to the town camp.

NT Emergency Service members searching the dry riverbed of the Todd for any sign of Sharon Granites. (ABC News: Will Green )

With no luck overnight, on Monday morning, police recommenced a foot and air search of the area, with the help of the force’s elite Territory Response Group (TRG).

By 9:30am on Monday, police announced to the media they believed Sharon had been abducted and were searching for Mr Lewis in relation to her disappearance.

Later that day, Mr Lewis’s long history of violence and repeated stints in NT prisons over the last decade was reported in the media.

Among his past offences were serious assaults, contraventions of domestic violence orders, breaches of bail and acts of resisting police.

The search continued on Tuesday, including through dense scrubland. Speaking at a press conference that morning, police said despite two days of search efforts yielding no results, they believed the five-year-old girl was still alive.

Peter Malley says police believe Sharon Granites is still alive. (ABC News: Will Green)

NT Police Assistant Commissioner for Crime and Intelligence Peter Malley said the girl’s suspected abduction had been declared a major crime and finding her was the force’s “number one priority”.

Assistant Commissioner Malley added that the case was “one of the biggest investigations [the NT’s] had going for a while”, with the “TRG, motorbikes, horses, helicopters, drones” all having been deployed for the search effort, as well as Aboriginal trackers.

Horses, dogs and helicopters have all been used in the search for the missing girl. (ABC News: Will Green)

The assistant commissioner said a fugitive task force had also been called to Alice Springs to assist on Tuesday.

The NT Police Force’s executive director of cultural reform, Leanne Liddle, said the mother of the five-year-old girl was “distraught” and was going through “every parent’s worst nightmare”.

Police are continuing to call on anyone with information about Sharon or Mr Lewis to contact them, no matter “how small in detail you think it may be”.