Interview with Dr Goncalo Amaral

"At about 11.50pm, Gerry abruptly announced, 'Right, I'm off to bed, Goodnight."........"I must admit I was slightly hurt that Gerry should just go off without me, as if I was unimportant - irrelevant, even........"

Mrs McCann must be as thick as two short ones. Didn't see she the utter irony of her words?


Change the sentence to "I must admit that we were slightly hurt that mummy and daddy should just go off without us, as if we were unimportant - irrelevant, even..."

GA was quoted in yesterday's Mirror as expressing an opinion in a free country. Over the years has nobody of real substance come forward and commented upon the quality of parenting whereby children were left alone in an aprtment in a foreign country whilst the parents went out drinking? This after all is supposed to be a free country too.

Lands_end wrote:

j.rob wrote:Yeah well, the whole case is really quite crazy IMO, and i think they must live in the twilight zone, or some other alternate universe,

Indeed! 

I know that sometimes people say they cannot believe that a group of doctors could behave with such nonchalance in terms of health and safety.

I have to say that I find some doctors, in particular, can be astonishingly cavalier about other people's health and safety. Dismissing people's problems as 'nothing' when it later transpires that the patient was very right to be worried.

It is also a total myth that doctors as a group will necessarily be more careful about their own children in terms of health, safety and well-being. One of my parents was a doctor and I was probably the only child at school who never, ever, was allowed a day off however sick or ill I felt. Unless you had a limb hanging off or a half severed artery you were making a fuss and were fine.

And we were also the kids in the street who would be running around half feral, most definitely raising a few eyebrows among the more conservative parents in the neighbourhood.  

And my parents' doctor friends were often equally laissez-faire. And My God - could they drink!

So I am really not at all surprised that one of the McCanns' children came to grief. Although I do think there is more to this story than just an accident. Gerry McCann is one scary individual, imo.

J. Rob. You coined it in this post, well done. I wish a few more people in the world saw things for what they are. The only thing I would add to that is that if something ever were to go wrong then Doctors will stick to each other like superglue. Exactly the actions of the Tapas gang. I have seen this with my own eyes so please no pointless deletions admins.

I actually think this may be *one* of the keys to unraveling the mystery. TM were reckless in terms of their childcare. They have told us as much.

Detective Amaral states it is a FACT that the McCanns "abandoned" their children that week leaving them in danger. And it is a FACT that they lost Madeleine. Note the phraseology. Not that "Madeleine was taken" which is the mantra that Kate and Gerry repeat. 

Obviously, there are different meanings to the word "lost". It could literally mean she got lost due to being abandoned (and then came to grief - eg: the accident that Amaral speaks of). 

Or it could be a euphemism for 'loosing someone' - ie: experiencing the loss of someone who has died. 

And of course the McCann mantra 'was taken' can also have different meanings. Someone literally took Madeleine away which is what they want people to believe or it could also mean 'was taken' (away from us) by death. 

Yes to the bolded part above. IF Amaral is right and Madeleine had an accident that week and IF all the Tapas parents 'abandoned' their children in the manner that Amaral claims the McCanns did that week then the whole group may very well have adopted a "there but for the grace of God" mentality which caused them to stick together. Perhaps thinking that what happened to Madeleine could have equally well happened to one of the other Tapas children. And it was just really bad luck that it happened to the McCanns.

One might just about be able to buy that if the checking story was true (although I think leaving such young children in an unknown place without a babysitter or at least a child monitor is reckless) but when the detective who investigated the case unambiguously states that the it is a FACT that the McCann's abandoned their children to a thousand dangers then the whole TM 'baby-listening' arrangements story starts to unravel.

And in any event when the McCanns ADMIT that they left their children for 45 minutes out of ear-shot and out of sight to go to a bar after dinner. And don't even pretend that the reason they returned to the apartment was that they were worried about their children, then you know that their children's welfare was not at the forefront of their minds that week.

While I do believe there is more to this story than an abandoned child having an accident, even if this was the whole story I can still understand why there might have been a cover-up. 

Can you imagine the media storm? Doctors' daughter dies in accident in Mark Warner resort in the Algarve. The four year old was left alone each night in their holiday apartment with her two your old siblings while her doctor parents ate dinner in one of the hotel restaurants. They were holidaying with a group of mainly doctors who also left their children unsupervised each night. This was despite the fact that there was a night creche which was included or the option of paying for a babysitter. There was also the option of dining en famille in one of the hotel restaurants. Or getting a takeaway from one of the restaurants and eating in. 

The group claimed they were regularly checking of the children but a neighbour heard a child crying in distress in the family's apartment for an hour and a quarter earlier in the week. And the family admit that one night they left the children for as long as 45 minutes as after dinner they then went to the hotel bar. 

It is a story that would not have put a very good light on the medical profession. And of course if the McCanns could get away with claiming that what they did was not so very different to the baby-listening' as carried out by Mark Warner, then that would raise the ugly possibility that Mark Warner's childcare arrangements were woefully inadequate. And children were being endangered. 

And perhaps also noteworthy that only a year previously - 2006 - there had been that truly dreadful accident at a Thomas Cook resort when two children died in a Thomas Cook holiday apartment due to a faulty boiler. 

Thomas Cook sent out a 'grief counsellor' or similar to the resort but the family claimed and continue to claim that Thomas Cook was always covering its back from the outset. The holiday company even sent the children's two coffins back on the same flight as the parents and other holidaymakers.

So the parents quite literally flew back from that Thomas Cook holiday with their two children in coffins. Somehow Thomas Cook kept that out of the media, didn't they???? Would have made a somewhat spectacularly terrible photo for the front pages. (So just how much money did Thomas Cook throw at this cast to avoid negative publicity??)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-32771355