Leave No Stone Unturned

The dates of Gerrys Sabbatical year in Amsterdam are important for my research, did he take this year off after the twins were born?

Were they still living in Amsterdam up until maybe Sep 05?

Verdi wrote:

The dates of Gerrys Sabbatical year in Amsterdam are important for my research, did he take this year off after the twins were born?

No, Gerry McCann his wife and daughter Madeleine moved to Amsterdam in January 2004 for one year for Gerry McCann's fellowship study.

Were they still living in Amsterdam up until maybe Sep 05?

No, they returned to England from Amsterdam at the beginning of December 2004.  Gerry McCann went back to Amsterdam to complete the final two weeks of his study, then returned again to England.

All that remains now is for all else to be pushed aside and for evidenced-based theory to take centre stage and be afforded the long-overdue platform it so rightfully deserves.

crusader wrote:I thought it was a blue blanket, there is one on the other bed as well.
They are not using duvets, so a thin blanket would have been used.
There is also blue blankets on the parents bed.

We chose Spain first, as it is so close to Portugal. After the British and Irish, most other visitors to the Algarve are German or Dutch, so we added Berlin and Amsterdam to the itinerary. Finally, we felt we needed to venture beyond Europe, to north Africa. Morocco was so easily accessible from Praia da Luz – ferries make the thirty-five-minute crossing from Tarifa in Spain to Tangiers several times a day – that there was a distinct possibility Madeleine could have been taken there. The Foreign Office helped us by arranging consular assistance in all these countries.

We were met at Madrid airport by several British Embassy staff, a liaison officer and two press officers, as well as a crowd of journalists and photographers, and taken to the hotel where we were to spend the night. Clarence briefed Gerry and me about the meetings and press conferences arranged for the next day and then we went up to our room to get some rest.

Once we’d been introduced to the British ambassador to Spain, the British consul for Madrid and a lady from the Justice and Home Affairs Department, we were scheduled to talk to representatives of three Spanish non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working with missing and exploited children.

In the afternoon we met Señor Rubalcaba, the Spanish interior minister. He listened attentively and his manner was gentle and sympathetic. He showed us the case file that had already been opened for Madeleine, which instantly brought us both some reassurance. There are two things I remember Señor Rubalcaba saying to us. ‘We are treating Madeleine as if she is one of our own,’ and ‘As time moves on, people forget. Please feel free to come and knock on my door at any point to remind me.’

At the beginning of June, Gerry had a call from the director of communications at the Foreign Office. There was concern in the government, he said, that Clarence was ‘becoming the story’. I am not quite sure what he meant by this. Clarence was certainly a visible presence and perhaps his open, affable style prevented him from being quite as anonymous as the Foreign Office would have liked. Perhaps it had drawn attention to the fact that they were still providing us with a media spokesperson and questions were being asked. It had been a month since Madeleine’s disappearance, so maybe they were simply trying gently to prompt us into appointing somebody of our own to help us.

Our schedule in Berlin looked a bit daunting, but in the event everything ran incredibly smoothly. Admirable German efficiency! After a television interview, we were off to meet the ambassador, Peter Torry, a nice man with three daughters of his own.

Some commentators seemed to be very preoccupied by how it was we were able to cope with meeting and greeting politicians,

Our next meeting was with the deputy justice minister, who gave us a document relating to a conference on child welfare that had been held in Berlin two days previously. Over lunch, I browsed through it. It dealt with the dramatic rise in child pornography and the way the internet had turned this hideous blight on our society into a billion-dollar industry.

The final encounter of the day was with the mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit. We’d heard that he was a colourful and charismatic man, well liked and something of a celebrity in the region. If his popularity and the respect in which he was held by the citizens of Berlin could benefit Madeleine, we were more than prepared to have another few hundred photographs taken standing next to him while he appealed for help.

At the Embassy, Ambassador Torry had been joined by David Connolly, an officer from SOCA (the Serious Organised Crime Agency).

The next day followed a similar tightly packed format to our visits to Madrid and Berlin. We had meetings with the ambassador, the UK police liaison officer for the KLPD (the Dutch national police), the consul general and a government policy adviser. We talked to the national police coordinator for missing persons.

Miss Biddy Brett-Rooks, the consul general for Casablanca, was there to meet us when we landed

That day several senior and powerful figures spent time with us, including the minister of the interior, Mr Benmoussa, and the director general of the police, Charki Draiss. The police attaché had told us earlier that for these meetings to take place, permission must have been granted by the King himself. Both Mr Benmoussa and Mr Draiss reiterated the message of the day:

On our final morning, the lady who’d been interpreting for us arranged for us to meet the minister of Islamic affairs, who happened to be her father-in-law. I was keen to talk to an Islamic religious leader to seek the support and prayers of the Muslim community.

I was grateful to find there was a jet available to return us to Portugal. At Lisbon airport, Gerry and I said our goodbyes to Clarence. He was going home to his family and the Media Monitoring Unit. He’d done a fantastic job over the previous three weeks (with everything we’d packed in, it felt like much longer than that), and what was important to us was that we knew Clarence cared deeply about getting Madeleine back and would continue to help us in any way he could. We couldn’t have anticipated he’d be rejoining us as soon as he did, and we never thought for a minute that, four years down the line, he’d still be fighting Madeleine’s corner alongside us.

Our visits to Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and Morocco had given us a glimpse of the massive scale of the problems of child abduction, trafficking and exploitation, and we felt we must broaden the scope of our campaign to embrace all the victims of these terrible crimes. We were now aware of the need, for example, to set up coordinated and effective child rescue alerts across Europe. Given the huge support we had been given ourselves, we had a moral obligation to try to do something to make Europe a safer place for all children. If, God forbid, we couldn’t help Madeleine, we were determined that some lasting good should come out of our nightmare.

The sexual exploitation of children in particular is shockingly rife worldwide. The victims of the billion-dollar child-pornography industry are becoming younger, too: approximately a third are under the age of six. A lot of what I’d learned made me feel sick. I was horrified, as a reasonably intelligent and well-informed person, and as a mother, by how little I knew of this. I felt as if I’d been living my life in a cocoon.

Another valuable source of information was Lady Catherine Meyer, the friend Cherie Blair had mentioned to me in her phone call. Catherine, the wife of the former British ambassador to the US, had set up PACT (Parents and Abducted Children Together) after her own two sons were abducted by her ex-husband. She has fought tirelessly ever since for a better international response to such crimes. I so admire her commitment to and passion for protecting children.

crusader wrote:And what good came of meeting with ambassadors, mayor, police chiefs politicians etc in foreign parts, not forgetting the Pope,....