Media Mayhem - MCCANN MEDIA NONSENSE OF THE DAY

‘Madeleine McCann was abducted by an opportunistic paedophile’

Mark Williams-Thomas: Analysis - April 28, 2008

The investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann is like no other I have seen before.

I have followed this case from the beginning. I visited the village of Praia da Luz within hours of Madeleine’s disappearance and have returned on numerous occasions to examine what happened on May 3 last year.

I believe that Madeleine was abducted outside her family’s apartment by an opportunistic paedophile with local connections. And I would be very surprised if this person has not been back to the area or still frequents it.

On the evening she disappeared I believe Madeleine woke up and cried for a short time while her parents were dining at a nearby tapas bar at the Ocean Club resort. When she realised that her parents were not there she climbed out of bed and walked around the apartment. She found the back patio door partly open so she walked out, went down the small flight of steps, through the metal gate and turned right down towards the entrance to the tapas bar.

It was at this point that she was abducted. Interestingly, police dogs first tracked a scent down this exact route. It is a vital clue that has been largely ignored. Unfortunately, although this area is in range of a CCTV camera at the nearby super-market, it was not working that night.

Statistically the abduction of a child is very rare. On average it happens to six children a year in Britain. However, if we look at the abduction and murder of Sarah Payne in July 2000 we can see that she was snatched by a passing stranger while her brothers were just steps behind.

Madeleine became the victim of an opportunist and predatory paedophile. The abductor either lives in or had contact with Praia da Luz. This is not the sort of resort you just happen upon. For the past 12 months the Portuguese police have pursued only two lines of inquiry: that Gerry and Kate McCann were involved or that their daughter was abducted by a stranger. They have focused steadfastly on the first line. It is quite correct for the police to consider the parents as suspects because most murdered children are killed by a relative or someone they know. But the police do not seem to have any real evidence against Mr and Mrs McCann and they have vehemently denied any involvement.

Mr and Mrs McCann believe their daughter was abducted and trafficked abroad but Madeleine does not fit the profile. Girls are trafficked into the sex trade as prostitutes or for domestic slavery, both with financial gain to the seller and purchaser. Who was to gain from her trafficking?

The so-called sightings in other countries, although genuinely intended, are a distraction and prove to be of little value after the initial two weeks. After all who is going to openly walk out with the most wanted child in the world? For months it was genuinely assumed the abductor had entered the apartment and taken Madeleine from her bed. But I do not believe that a paedophile was watching the apartment or that an offender entered the apartment.

This would be too high risk as the offender would not know that someone was not inside. Britain has not seen a single case of a predatory paedophile entering premises and abducting a child where the occupants of the house are unknown to the offender.

The problem with the police investigation was that it was crucially flawed from the very start. It was the worst-preserved crime scene I have seen.
The investigation is now all but closed. The police have insufficient evidence to charge Mr and Mrs McCann and when their arguido status is lifted the couple could return to Portugal without fear of arrest or prosecution.

They could then properly coordinate an investigation to find out what really did happen to Madeleine.

Mark Williams-Thomas is a former detective and authority on paedophile crimes

The Times Online April 2008

Parents release last known photo of Madeleine

By Richard Edwards and Fiona Govan in Praia da Luz
12:01AM BST 24 May 2007

[Note:  12:01 AM]

The family of missing Madeleine McCann today released the last known photograph of their daughter before her abduction in the Algarve three weeks ago.

Smiling and dangling her feet into a swimming pool, Madeleine, four, is shown enjoying her holiday just hours before she was snatched from her bed.

The picture was taken by Madeleine's mother Kate, 38, on her own camera.



Madeleine is pictured wearing a pink smock top, white shorts and a sun hat as she cools her feet in the swimming pool. The picture was taken at 2.29pm on May 3.

Less than eight hours later, before 10pm that night, Madeleine disappeared. She had been sleeping in the family's holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, next to the twins, when she was taken away.

Detectives investigating her disappearance yesterday re-interviewed two people as witnesses in the case.

The two were believed to be Michaela Walczuch, a German woman who is the lover of Robert Murat, and her estranged Portuguese husband Luis Antonio, who works as a pool cleaner.

Mr Murat is a British ex-pat who has been identified by police as a formal suspect in the case.A senior police source described yesterday's questioning, which lasted several hours, as "normal and routine". The pair were first questioned 10 days ago as a result of their connection to Mr Murat.

Mr Murat, who has not been charged or even formally arrested but remains the police's main line of inquiry, lives with his mother in a villa less than 100 yards from the Algarve holiday apartment where Madeleine was snatched three weeks ago.

He strenuously denies any involvement in Madeleine's disappearance and is said to be in a state of "near collapse" over the allegations. Police have said that they will continue to investigate those with links to Mr Murat.

They have already searched premises belonging to a Russian computer expert who reportedly had telephone conversations with Mr Murat in the hours immediately following Madeleine's disappearance.

The latest development came amid local media reports that forensic tests on evidence taken from the McCanns' apartment and Mr Murat's home had yielded no clues.



The head of the Forensic Medicine Institute of Portugal told the Portuguese newspaper Correio da Manha that tests on the samples had so far proved inconclusive.

"It is not like on the television show CSI," said Duarte Nuno Vieira, who explained that the investigation would take time.


"The analyses are ongoing," he added. "They're far from over, and we'll only be able to draw conclusions once they're completed."

Detailed DNA analysis on hair, fibres and sweat samples are not expected until at least Saturday, it was reported, at which point police may be in a position to arrest Mr Murat or drop the case against him completely.

The police search for Madeleine was strongly criticised yesterday as a leading expert said the Portuguese investigation had been plagued with "serious errors".


Mark Williams-Thomas, a former officer with Surrey police who worked on the case of Sarah Payne, the seven-year-old murdered by paedophile Roy Whiting, said detectives had failed to seal off the apartment when the four-year-old vanished and had not carried out proper forensic searches.

He said the investigation had hit "a brick wall" as a result and called for British detectives to carry out a full review of the case to ensure that everything was being done to find Madeleine.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1552519/Parents-release-last-known-photo-of-Madeleine.html

Producer quits 'dishonest' BBC programme about Madeleine McCann

By VANESSA ALLEN
Last updated at 00:15 26 November 2007

A producer quit a BBC programme about Madeleine McCann as he felt the documentary verged "on the dishonest", it was disclosed yesterday.

David Mills, who was the original producer on last week's Panorama special on the disappearance, walked out after an angry row with th programme's editor and then wrote a stinging email to the BBC, attacking it for losing its journalistic passion.

He said: "So far as I can see, investigative journalism at the BBC is over.

"The broadcast script contains nuances that suggest that the McCanns still have a case to answer. The BBC should have had the courage to state that this is simply not so."



Mr Mills, who has a 40-year career as a documentary-maker, asked the BBC to take his name off the end credits despite working on the programme for weeks.

He said he wanted to focus on the apparent campaign of disinformation put out by Portuguese police to put pressure on Kate and Gerry McCann, and to criticise press coverage of the case.

But he said the end programme put across the case both for and against the McCanns and reached no final conclusion.

In an email to Panorama editor Sandy Smith, he criticised the programme's "intellectual impoverishment" and said it was "far below the standard of any work that I or my company would wish to be associated with".

He said the programme "verges on the dishonest" and was "a laboured, pedestrian extended news report" which he branded "shameful".

He wrote: "The real question must be how, without any meaningful evidence, the Portuguese police and the media in Portugal and Britain have been able to convince most people that the couple were involved.

"Yet while the programme drips innuendos against the McCanns, it does not put a single challenging question to anyone in the Portuguese police or to anyone in the media. This is truly astonishing."

The incident is one of several controversies Panorama has faced this year including a report on Scientology by journalist John Sweeney, in which he lost his temper and turned - in his words - into an "exploding tomato", and a report claiming that wi-fi technology might be harmful, which was denounced by some scientists as "irresponsible".

Mr Smith said the decisions about the programme's content were made after it obtained new footage, including an interview with witness Jane Tanner, and said: "The original version was just not journalistically as important."

McCann family spokesman Clarence Mitchell, a former BBC reporter, said the couple were 'content' with the broadcast version and had spoken to reporter Richard Bilton and told him they considered it 'fair'.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-496385/Producer-quits-dishonest-BBC-programme-Madeleine-McCann.html

Madeleine 'was killed as she screamed at pervert prowler', police to conclude
By VANESSA ALLEN
Last updated at 13:23 27 November 2007

Madeleine McCann was killed in her family's holiday apartment when she screamed out in alarm at a paedophile intruder, it has been claimed.

Police believe the three-year-old may have been accidentally suffocated by a prowler who panicked when she shouted out.

Fearing that her cries would raise the alarm, he violently silenced her - accidentally killing her - and then grabbed her body and escaped, according to the new theory.

It was that fleeing man - carrying the slumped body of a child - who was spotted by the McCanns' friend Jane Tanner, it was claimed.

The theory was revealed in the respected Portuguese newspaper Publico, which carried a chilling recreation of the supposed chain of events.

The newspaper said the theory was "gaining increasing strength at the centre of the police investigation".

It came a week after Portugal's Attorney General Fernando Pinto Monteiro said he believed Madeleine was "probably dead".

The latest theory came as a blow to Kate and Gerry McCann, who have insisted they believe their daughter is being held somewhere alive.

But it does suggest that detectives are moving away from the belief that the couple were involved in her disappearance.

They are now working on the theory that a prowler monitored the family's routine during their week-long holiday, and carefully chose a moment to strike, Publico reported.

The couple's regular habits - including their meal times and their routine in checking on their children - made it 'easy' for the intruder to pick a moment when he did not think he would be disturbed, the newspaper claimed.

It carried a highly dramatised recreation of the supposed chain of events, which said: "An unexpected event thwarted the prospect of desire. A shout from the British child awakened from her sleep.

"The fear that she would be heard, the urgency to silence her, the violence, probably the suffocation and the unexpected death.

"All this is in minutes. Now one would have to take her out of there, close the door, escape quickly."

The theory was said to be "seriously considered" by senior police officers leading the investigation, but they have not ruled out other possibilities, including that the McCanns could have been involved.

Their spokesman Clarence Mitchell said the report was "extremely distressing" for the couple.

He said: "We do not believe that this is what happened to Madeleine. There has been no evidence to suggest this happened in the apartment at all.
"We are still firmly of the belief that Madeleine is alive and will be found."

The couple were named as official suspects in the case after specialist sniffer dogs detected microscopic traces of blood in their holiday apartment, and the "scent of death" in their hire car.

They have always insisted they believe Madeleine was taken alive from the apartment, and that their friend Miss Tanner saw the suspect fleeing with her.
A source close to the couple said the theory that a paedophile killed her inside the flat and then carried her body away was "ludicrous".

He said: "It is an absolutely ludicrous suggestion. If a paedophile had killed her in the apartment he would have left her there and fled.

"There is no way he would have carried her dead body through the streets where people would have witnessed it."

Mr McCann has told police he checked on the children at about 9pm, and then bumped into a friend, television producer Jeremy Wilkins, and stopped to speak to him.

While the two men were speaking the McCanns' friend Miss Tanner - one of the so-called Tapas Nine - said she walked past them and then saw the fleeing man moments later, at about 9.15pm.

Mr McCann has spoken of his belief that an intruder might have been hiding inside the flat already when he went to check on the children.

But it would still only give the alleged paedophile just a few minutes to supposedly disturb Madeleine into screaming, to accidentally suffocate her and then flee with her body by 9.15pm.

McCann spokesman Mr Mitchell said he did not believe an intruder would have had time to kill Madeleine and escape.

He said: "Any abductor would not have had time to do what is alleged here.

"The only point in this report to draw comfort from is the indication that police no longer believe that Kate and Gerry are involved in Madeleine's disappearance."

A nanny who used to work at the Ocean Club holiday complex has told the McCanns' private detectives that she saw a man trying to lift the window shutters at the same apartment where the McCanns later stayed.

The woman, who has not been named, said the man she saw in December last year looked like the other official suspect in the case, British expat Robert Murat.

His friends dismissed the alleged sighting as a smear and said it could not have been the 34-year-old as he was in Britain from October to January this year.

Miss Tanner has told the McCanns that she could not tell if the man she saw was Mr Murat, as she did not see his face. He denies any involvement in Madeleine's disappearance.

An investigating judge has to decide early next year whether to end the secrecy surrounding the Madeleine McCann case - and decide whether to let her parents and Robert Murat see the police evidence against them.

Heart surgeon Gerry and GP Kate, both 39, have always protested their innocence and claimed an intruder took their daughter.

The McCanns have rubbished the suggestion - thought to have been top of the police list of theories until now - that Madeleine died by accident in their apartment and they disposed of her body as part of a "cover-up."

Claims emerged last night that Portuguese police had initially considered whether the couple could have sold their daughter to paedophiles.

Detectives reportedly believed the couple might have sold Madeleine to a criminal network to ease money worries,

According to sources, they spent "several days" investigating but the wild theory fell apart when they realised the couple were wealthy.

A police source told the Portuguese newspaper 24 Horas: "The police team in charge of the case investigated the possibility that the child had been sold by her own parents because of financial difficulties."

Detectives tried to inspect bank statements but were forced to conclude that the
couple did not have money problems.


The McCanns, who are both doctors, live in a £500,000 house in Rothley, Leicestershire.

Police were said to be suspicious about reports that Mrs McCann screamed: "They've taken her" when she realised Madeleine was missing. She insists she shouted: "She's gone."

Detectives have been unable to seize the couple's bank statements, phone records covering this May or their medical records.

The public prosecutor in the case has refused to authorise such moves unless he sees stronger evidence against them.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-496379/Madeleine-killed-screamed-pervert-prowler-police-conclude.html

Madeleine McCann's father returns to Portugal to give evidence in libel case

Gerry McCann looks to testify in case against Gonçalo Amaral, who published book about Madeleine's disappearance in 2007

Press Association
Wed 2 Oct 2013 11.30 BST





Madeleine McCann's father has returned to a Portuguese court in the hope that he can give evidence at his family's libel case against a former local police chief who claims Madeleine's abduction was faked.

Gerry McCann wants to testify in the case against Gonçalo Amaral, who published a book about Madeleine's disappearance in May 2007.

The McCanns say the former detective's claims in the book The Truth of the Lie, including suggestions that they hid their daughter's body after she died in an accident and then faked her abduction, damaged the hunt for Madeleine and exacerbated their anguish.

If successful in the case, the family stands to gain around £1m in damages.

Gerry McCann was left frustrated after flying to Portugal last week, when proceedings were adjourned because one of Amaral's lawyers could not be present.

Arriving at the Palace of Justice in Lisbon on Wednesday morning, McCann said he was not sure what would happen "after last week".


"We are here to listen to the judge and hopefully be heard," he told reporters.

He travelled to the Portuguese capital with his sister, Trish Cameron, and his wife Kate McCann's mother, Susan Healy, who are both expected to appear as witnesses in the case.

Kate McCann attended the court last month on the first day of the case, telling reporters she was in Portugal to "stop the damage" she believes is being caused to the search for her daughter.

The court has heard how she had suicidal thoughts after Amaral claimed she had covered up her daughter's death.


Psychologist Alan Pike said that after the publication of the former police chief's book in July 2008, Kate McCann "thought about not being around any more".

Madeleine, who was nearly four, disappeared from her family's holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in the Algarve on 3 May 2007 as her parents dined at a nearby restaurant with friends.

Amaral, who initially led the inquiry into Madeleine's disappearance, was removed from the case in October 2007 after criticising UK police.

British detectives launched a fresh investigation into the youngster's disappearance in July this year and believe she could still be alive.

The Portuguese investigation into Madeleine's disappearance is officially closed.


The case, in which Amaral denies defamation, is expected to finish hearing evidence in November.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/oct/02/madeleine-mccann-father-portuguese-court-evidence-libel-case

Biased media manipulation at it's finest hour.

Fears Madeleine McCann was 'snatched for rich family' after reports of Morocco sightings

Telegraph Reporters - 24 April 2017

Madeleine McCann may have been abducted by slave traders and sold to a rich family, a former policeman has claimed, amid reports of a possible sighting.

Almost 10 years after the three-year-old girl vanished while the family were on holiday in Portugal, private detectives hired by the McCanns reportedly believe she may have been smuggled by ferry into Africa.

Gangs in Mauritania, West Africa, are known to sell youngsters to wealthy Middle Eastern families.

Colin Sutton, a former Scotland Yard detective, told the Mirror: “The Mauritania line is certainly a possibility and needs to be looked at.

“If someone wanted to get a three-year-old child into Africa it’s the obvious route. The infrastructure and contacts for people smuggling are clearly there.”

Private detectives reportedly believe she was snatched and taken to the country via Morocco, where there have been alleged sightings.

It is not known if police have investigated the Mauritania theory as part of their investigations.

Shortly after Madeleine disappeared on May 3, 2007, a traveller reportedly told Crimestoppers they saw a girl that looked like Madeleine on the Tarifa-Tangier ferry, four days after she vanished.

Two days later, a tourist reported seeing a girl “identical” to Madeleine with a man at a petrol station next to an Ibis hotel in Marrakech, the Mirror reported.

According to the newspaper, Mari Olli and British husband Ray Pollard, who live in Spain, said they had not heard of Madeleine’s disappearance when they made the possible sighting and only made the connection when they returned home.


She said the youngster she saw was wearing blue pyjamas, looked “sad” and asked: “Can we see Mummy soon?”

Ms Olli said she alerted Portuguese and UK authorities and gave a statement to Scotland Yard detectives. She followed it up by emailing Leicestershire Police.

Portuguese police files made public a year after Madeleine's disappearance show British police passed on the email to their Portuguese counterparts but Ms Olli says she was never contacted by officers there.

"I try not to think about what I could have done. The one thing I’m still convinced about is that it was Madeleine," she told the Mirror.

Madeleine vanished from Praia da Luz in May 2007 when the three-year-old was sleeping in the family's apartment with her siblings, twins Amelie and Sean.

At the time, her parents, Gerry and Kate, were eating dinner with friends at a restaurant around 40 yards away.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/24/fears-madeleine-mccann-snatched-rich-family-reports-morocco/



Team McCann Co. Ltd. do like a touch of the melodrama don't they?  

Give me strength - smuggled out of Portugal for the slave trade?   If a rich whoever wanted a western fair haired child for whatever reason, why not hang around the school gates or some recreation ground - why go the trouble of hanging around a low key holiday resort on the Algarve in the hope of finding a suitable target?  How would this gang of smugglers know that a little three year old girl would be holidaying for a few days in April/May 2007?  How did they know an ideal child was staying at the Ocean Club for a few days in April/May 20?

For crying out loud - get real!

Verdi wrote:Madeleine McCann's father returns to Portugal to give evidence in libel case

Gerry McCann looks to testify in case against Gonçalo Amaral, who published book about Madeleine's disappearance in 2007

Press Association
Wed 2 Oct 2013 11.30 BST





Madeleine McCann's father has returned to a Portuguese court in the hope that he can give evidence at his family's libel case against a former local police chief who claims Madeleine's abduction was faked.

Gerry McCann wants to testify in the case against Gonçalo Amaral, who published a book about Madeleine's disappearance in May 2007.

The McCanns say the former detective's claims in the book The Truth of the Lie, including suggestions that they hid their daughter's body after she died in an accident and then faked her abduction, damaged the hunt for Madeleine and exacerbated their anguish.

If successful in the case, the family stands to gain around £1m in damages.

Gerry McCann was left frustrated after flying to Portugal last week, when proceedings were adjourned because one of Amaral's lawyers could not be present.

Arriving at the Palace of Justice in Lisbon on Wednesday morning, McCann said he was not sure what would happen "after last week".


"We are here to listen to the judge and hopefully be heard," he told reporters.

He travelled to the Portuguese capital with his sister, Trish Cameron, and his wife Kate McCann's mother, Susan Healy, who are both expected to appear as witnesses in the case.

Kate McCann attended the court last month on the first day of the case, telling reporters she was in Portugal to "stop the damage" she believes is being caused to the search for her daughter.

The court has heard how she had suicidal thoughts after Amaral claimed she had covered up her daughter's death.


Psychologist Alan Pike said that after the publication of the former police chief's book in July 2008, Kate McCann "thought about not being around any more".

Madeleine, who was nearly four, disappeared from her family's holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in the Algarve on 3 May 2007 as her parents dined at a nearby restaurant with friends.

Amaral, who initially led the inquiry into Madeleine's disappearance, was removed from the case in October 2007 after criticising UK police.

British detectives launched a fresh investigation into the youngster's disappearance in July this year and believe she could still be alive.

The Portuguese investigation into Madeleine's disappearance is officially closed.


The case, in which Amaral denies defamation, is expected to finish hearing evidence in November.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/oct/02/madeleine-mccann-father-portuguese-court-evidence-libel-case

Biased media manipulation at it's finest hour.

"Dior Homme" look

McCanns' agony at 'body in fridge' slur Parents dismiss new police claim in Maddy mystery as 'hurtful'

September 29 2007 12:00 AM

THE parents of Madeleine McCann have called for an end to the "hurtful" smear campaign after sensational new claims that her mother hid her corpse in a fridge after accidentally killing her.

Tomorrow is the 150th day since Madeleine disappeared. Kate and Gerry McCann will attend a church service near their home in Rothley, Leceistershire, but there will be no special event to generate publicity.

It was claimed yesterday that police in Portugal now believe that Kate McCann killed Madeleine while putting her to bed at their holiday apartment in Praia da Luz between 7pm and 8.30pm on May 3 and then hid her corpse in a fridge, with the help of friends.

The respected Diario de Noticias newspaper said officers believed that she accidentally killed Madeleine while her husband was playing tennis.

Her body then "passed through various locations" before going into the boot of the car hired by her parents 25 days after she disappeared, it reported.

As a result, detectives want to inspect fridges at the Ocean Club complex where the McCanns were staying with a group of seven British adults.

A source close to the McCanns said: "That is total rubbish. Have you seen the size of the fridges in those apartments? Of course they did not stuff her in a fridge. Kate was not in the apartment alone with Maddy.

"They had both been playing tennis, then they put her to bed together and were then down for dinner (with their friends) by 8.20pm."

The report is the latest of a series of allegations in the Portuguese media credited to anonymous detectives from the Policia Judiciaria. There are concerns that the McCanns have become victims of "black propaganda" being put out by police to explain why they were made official suspects.

Clarence Mitchell, the McCanns' spokesman, said: "We do not know who is putting all this out in Portugal but for the family's sake it's time for it to stop. Every one of these nonsensical allegations causes real pain and hurt for both Gerry and Kate, who cannot help but be aware of them. It makes a most awful situation far, far worse, because they know it's not true.


"I am very grateful for the media support; it is immeasurable in terms of what has been done to help find Madeleine, but these reports are increasing the pain for Kate and Gerry.

"We just hope that everyone can see these ridiculous rumours for what they are. It is very hard on the couple because they are not allowed to talk about the investigation and cannot defend themselves."

Mr Mitchell said that the McCanns would attend church tomorrow. "It will be just another day without Madeleine," he said.

Ordeal
It was reported yesterday that the couple, both 39, may speak out about their ordeal in a television show with a celebrity interviewer.

The McCanns have previously turned down requests for interviews with Oprah Winfrey and Larry King but they are said to be considering a request from the veteran American broadcaster Barbara Walters for an interview to coincide with the launch of an stg£80,000 (€114,000) advertising campaign for the search for their daughter.

The couple are said to be furious that they cannot speak out because of Portuguese judicial secrecy laws. The law, however, prohibits them only from discussing evidence in the case.

The McCanns had used their campaign to find Madeleine as an opportunity to raise awareness about other missing children and to call for better alert systems.

It was announced yesterday that Portugal is to call for an EU-wide alert system for missing children. Portugal, which holds the rotating EU presidency, will ask member states at a meeting in Lisbon this week if they want to expand to all 27 countries a new French alert system involving a nationwide media campaign and messages in stations and on motorways.

Meanwhile, Gerry McCann yesterday threw his backing behind the move to create the Europe-wide alert system for missing children.

Portugal is reportedly pushing for such a system to be set up at a key meeting of European home affairs ministers next week.
Madeleine went missing from her parents' rented holiday flat on the Algarve on May 3.


Portuguese police faced criticism over the speed of their response to the disappearance including questions over how quickly it sealed borders and alerted ports and airports.

Images of Madeleine were circulated through the media by friends and family in the hours after Madeleine's disappearance.
Now Portugal is said to be backing the extension of a French alert system, which includes electronic roadside messages, across the EU's 27 countries.


In the UK, a similar county-wide scheme, including automatic media alerts, was pioneered in Surrey after the disappearance of local schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

Gerry McCann said: "If this is true, we would very much welcome it as a major step in the right direction.

"Kate and I have consistently campaigned to effect such changes throughout the European Union to help protect children everywhere.''

Mr McCann travelled to Washington DC earlier this year to meet the then US Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to discuss measures in place there.

There, news of a missing child in Arkansas could be notified to police in California in less than two hours.

The McCanns' spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, said: "From his own experience during his recent trip to America, Gerry felt that the US is some distance ahead of Europe.

"Clearly a widening of effective systems to raise immediate awareness of missing children across the EU is exactly the sort of long-term change Gerry and Kate are working so hard to achieve.''

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/mccanns-agony-at-body-in-fridge-slur-parents-dismiss-new-police-claim-in-maddy-mystery-as-hurtful-26321669.htm
....................

Now tell me Clarence Mitchell wasn't behind all the media reports, day in day out.  It suited their mutual purpose to have negative reportage running alongside positive reportage.

Who said social media is the evil force against a 'fair trial'?  That was nicely manufactured by the mighty force of team McCann commencing May 2007 up to the present day..

McCann team tests car for traces of Madeleine



By Fiona Govan in Praia da Luz

8:50AM GMT 20 Nov 2007

The McCanns' legal team has carried out independent forensic tests on the car hired by the couple 25 days after Madeleine disappeared and found no trace of the missing girl, it has emerged.

Portuguese police made Kate and Gerry McCann arguidos - formal suspects - after allegedly finding "bodily fluids" belonging to Madeleine in the boot of the McCanns Renault Scenic hire car.

It has been reported that police believe that Madeleine's body had been transported in the rental car, weeks after she accidentally died in the holiday apartment, perhaps from an overdose of sedatives.

They are said to be awaiting the results of DNA tests from a laboratory in Birmingham to confirm their suspicions.

Last night it emerged that lawyers working for the couple had hired independent forensic scientists to examine the car, which had been kept in a garage of an Algarve holiday villa after they returned to the UK.

Brian Kennedy, the wealthy business man who is funding the McCann's own efforts to investigate their daughter's disappearance, confirmed the tests had taken place.

"We did our own tests on the hire car and found no traces of Madeleine," he said.

He said that the tests had been carried out by a team of independent Home Office accredited pathologists and were completely reliable.

The forensic team also examined hairs belonging to Madeleine's siblings, twins Sean and Amelie, 2, but found no trace of them ever having been given sedatives.

Madeleine, who was three years old at the time, went missing from her parents holiday apartment in Praia da Luz on May 3.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1569964/McCann-team-tests-car-for-traces-of-Madeleine.html

Madeleine McCann's parents look to US sniffer dog case



By Caroline Gammell in Praia da Luz

12:01AM BST 17 Sep 2007

[For those who still believe Madeleine McCann's disappearance was reported by the Telegraph at midnight on 3rd/4th May 2007, please not the time]

Kate and Gerry McCann's legal team has contacted American lawyers over a case where key sniffer dog evidence was thrown out of court in the hope that it may help them fight any charges that they were involved in the killing of their daughter.

The couple fear that Portuguese police will rely on the behaviour of cadaver dogs who allegedly detected "the smell of death" on Mrs McCann's clothes.

Detectives in the Algarve are understood to be working on the theory that Mrs McCann accidentally killed four-year-old Madeleine and her husband helped her get rid of the body. The couple have dismissed this as "ludicrous".

The "smell of death" was not only allegedly detected on Mrs McCann's clothes but in the family's holiday apartment in Praia da Luz and the Renault Scenic car hired 25 days after Madeleine disappeared, Portuguese sources claimed. A source close to the McCanns' solicitors said the smell on Mrs McCann could be explained by being in contact with corpses while working as a GP.

The couple, from Rothley, Leics, are already preparing their defence in case they are charged with their daughter's death.

Their UK lawyers consulted the legal team of Eugene Zapata, 68, who is accused of murdering his estranged wife Jeanette in 1976.

He was charged with murder last year after dogs indicated that they sniffed human remains in the basement of the former family home in Madison, Wisconsin.

But a judge ruled last month that the evidence was no more reliable than "the flip of a coin" and could not be put before a jury.

"The court papers, giving the legal submissions, are on their way to the McCann team for consideration," said the source close to the McCanns' solicitors.

"At the moment there is no formal allegation against which the McCann team can work.

"But given that we understand the central plank of what the police are alleging involves sniffer dogs, this is important and relevant, and will be raised with the police and brought to the judge's attention."

Senior Portuguese police sources admitted at the weekend that there was "nothing concrete" with which to charge the couple.

In the last 10 days they have been declared formal suspects, accused of fleeing Portugal and endured a number of slurs about their parenting but they began to fight back by launching a newspaper and poster campaign focused in Spain and Portugal to highlight Madeleine's disappearance.

The couple were also boosted by the public backing of Sir Richard Branson, the Virgin boss, who contributed £100,000 to kick start a fund to pay for their legal team.

He has taken a personal interest in the investigation and has spoken at length to Mr and Mrs McCann.

His spokesman said: "When the McCanns said under no circumstances would they touch the find-Madeleine fund and mentioned they would sell their house, he felt he had to do something."

The McCanns have appointed top lawyers in Portugal and Britain to clear "the cloud of suspicion" enveloping them.

A source close to them said: "Any so-called evidence can be explained. There are wholly innocent reasons for everything that the police may have found which gives them cause for suspicion."

In an unprecedented move, the investigating judge, Pedro Daniel dos Anjos Frias, is understood to want to speak publicly about the case.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1563381/Madeleine-McCanns-parents-look-to-US-sniffer-dog-case.html

It's not silence the McCanns want, it's front-page news

Mary Riddell



The media are not exploiting the Maddie story. Rather, it is her parents who are exploiting the media. And they are right to do so


Sun 20 May 2007


Slowly, the mood is changing in Praia da Luz. A disgruntled Portuguese cafe owner asks my colleague: 'Why don't you just go home?' And soon, if nothing happens, this man will leave, along with the rest of the British media. By then, the poster face of Madeleine McCann may be fading and peeling from shop doorways. This is the moment her parents dread.

The McCanns are a family in need. They do not require the state support that this definition normally implies. Their lifeline is the publicity they see as vital if they are to see their missing daughter again. This neediness sits strangely with the widespread cry that Gerry and Kate McCann are the victims of those exploiting the grief of strangers. On the contrary, the McCanns long to have their sorrow ransacked and their solitude violated. Exposure, they think, is the last best hope they have.

The story of Madeleine McCann has no parallel. Her image is already part of the mental mural of modern Britain, along with Damilola Taylor skipping between bollards and James Bulger walking from a shopping mall, holding a big boy's hand. But, in the two weeks since Madeleine disappeared from her bed, the clamour has reflected something new.

David Beckham and other footballers plead for her release. MPs and cricketers wear yellow ribbons, text messages exhort grievers to light candles and 25 million people visited her mother's website in one day. As Somalia and Darfur starve, the fund for Madeleine attracts more givers than a tsunami appeal. Some think this outpouring mawkish and disproportionate; others see it as the proof of goodness.

Either way, it is not spontaneous. In the Algarve, the family and their advisers are running the slickest of PR operations. Each walk, church visit or jog on the beach is a photo-opportunity. Commentators may linger on their grief, but the McCanns allow themselves no such luxury. Their daughter's beauty and their faith, middle-class status, perfect family image and their heedless twins are their product range in a marketing campaign fuelled by the hard-headedness of desperation.

This fusion of emotion and calculation has made some people uneasy. The media, increasingly, are being accused of an orgy of excess. It is true that the demonisation of the two uncharged men at the centre of the investigation has been repugnant, but critics mostly seem less worried by witch-hunts than by the supposed prurience of those whipping up a mob frenzy.

That, though, is not what is happening. People have, in the main, been quietly sympathetic. They might send a cheque or talk about Madeleine but, outside her home village in Leicestershire, any show of emotion is subdued. I have not seen anyone wearing a yellow ribbon in my part of north London. Barring the celebrity-averse Gordon Brown, said to have shed a tear as he held the hand of Madeleine's aunt, there has been little conspicuous emotion among the corporate donors, the famous sympathisers and the millions responding to the McCann family's 'please help' emails.

This story, one of the most powerful narratives of this century, is not another parable of the emotional incontinence of the British masses. Most of the participants would never have stooped to buy carnations for Diana or shackle teddy bears to railings. It is not about voracious media or velvety compassion or the emotional striptease of the therapy age.

It does, though, have the ugly elements that have marked myths of the missing since the underworld Daimones lured the young and beautiful to their beds. They have been replaced by the paedophiles and assorted predators whose shadow haunts parents. British children might be the safest in the world, and the most overprotected, but they are perceived as targets of social kleptomania. In an age obsessed by stolen childhood, it is unsurprising that a stolen child has become the story overshadowing the end of a political era.

There are some old reasons why this one narrative has bubbled through a crust of other loss and sorrow. From the worship of Dionysius to the Mexican wave, mass events have either rallied or repulsed humanity, depending on your taste. In a society routinely branded as atomised, participation is now tailored to Big Brotherdom. To some, this saga has all the tackiness of reality television. Fed up of Wife Swap? Tune into Child Snatch, updated round the clock. Send money or a text. Be a part of someone else's drama and the first live audience in the national pilot show for interactive grief. Welcome to Celebrity Sorrow Club

I don't believe, though, that ordinary people are so cynical. They know, from their own families, that almost no child reaches adulthood without some brush with death and they simply hope that this one may be spared. Shared hope and fear and experience are the most visceral social bonds, as ancient and deep-rooted as love.

They are the sinews of a narrative that has united the candle-lighters, the texters and the givers in a story whose fallout has certainly not been all good. There is, somewhere in the mix, a whiff of emotional coercion equating yellow ribbon refuseniks with stoniness of heart. There has been more than a whiff of blame and exploitation, too, and not only by the chancers setting up fake websites. One pro-life organisation dedicated to highlighting 'the evils of abortion and contraception' has given over its entire online news coverage to Madeleine.

But those who shudder at media excess are really objecting to the way hope has been harnessed. Their complaints are often a polite, and rather hypocritical, device for not criticising the McCann family, whose plight is supposedly being exploited by a vulgar nation leeching off their quiet dignity. Nothing could be further from the truth.

This is not another plague of the grief virus to which Britain is spasmodically prone or a story of hysteria. It is the first hybrid of news management and the extremity of personal sorrow. The Madeleine message is part of an orchestrated campaign of clamour, drama and purpose: anything to defer the awful reality of silence.

The fund, the celebrity endorsement and the self-exposure are one family's attempt to create, in their missing daughter's name, a search machine and a legend that will endure long after the circus finally leaves town.

The McCanns have used every available stratagem in the post-privacy, celebrity-driven, commercialised world of 24/7 news. They are selling a modern fairytale, dark and beguiling, and we are buying, believing that a child's life may still hang on this transaction. The hunt for Madeleine McCann is pitched at the crossroads between the Brothers Grimm and Facebook and anchored in the arcane truth that parents will fight by any means available to secure a child's survival. Good luck to them.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/may/20/comment.pressandpublishing
....................

The Guardian do likea touch of the melodrama don't it?  This article is dated 20th May 2007, less than three weeks after Madeleine McCann's alleged disappearance - it's not what you know but who you know?


[*]
[*][url=https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Mary Riddell%3A It's not silence the McCanns want%2C it's front-page news&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2007%2Fmay%2F20%2Fcomment.pressandpublishing%3FCMP%3Dshare_btn_tw][/url]
[*][url=https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Mary Riddell%3A It's not silence the McCanns want%2C it's front-page news&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2007%2Fmay%2F20%2Fcomment.pressandpublishing%3FCMP%3Dshare_btn_tw] [/url]
[*]

• [email=?subject=Mary%20Riddell%3A%20It's%20not%20silence%20the%20McCanns%20want%2C%20it's%20front-page%20news&body=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2007%2Fmay%2F20%2Fcomment.pressandpublishing%3FCMP%3Dshare_btn_link] [/email]
  

Shares

0

Comments

99



Slowly, the mood is changing in Praia da Luz. A disgruntled Portuguese cafe owner asks my colleague: 'Why don't you just go home?' And soon, if nothing happens, this man will leave, along with the rest of the British media. By then, the poster face of Madeleine McCann may be fading and peeling from shop doorways. This is the moment her parents dread.
The McCanns are a family in need. They do not require the state support that this definition normally implies. Their lifeline is the publicity they see as vital if they are to see their missing daughter again. This neediness sits strangely with the widespread cry that Gerry and Kate McCann are the victims of those exploiting the grief of strangers. On the contrary, the McCanns long to have their sorrow ransacked and their solitude violated. Exposure, they think, is the last best hope they have.

'I was deceived' says the Portuguese priest who comforted Gerry and Kate McCann

18th October 2007

The Portuguese priest who comforted Gerry and Kate McCann in the days after Madeleine vanished last night said he had been deceived, it has emerged.

According to reports, Father Jose Manuel Pacheco claimed he had done nothing wrong and was simply "supporting two lost souls."

But, bizarrely, he also appeared to say he had been the victim of some form of deception



It has also emerged Father Pacheco was apparently called in to see his superior, Algarve Bishop Manuel Quintas and warned about his behaviour.

In the days after Madeleine vanished on May 3, the McCanns, both 39 and devout Catholics, frequently sought refuge at the priest's church.

They became so close to Father Pacheco, he gave them the keys to the tiny building so they could go in to pray whenever they liked.

However, his friendship with the couple appeared to spectacularly backfire after police became convinced Kate had told him she had killed her daughter during confession.

But he has vowed to take whatever she had said to the grave, despite being quizzed by detectives.

Father Pacheco appeared to virtually vanish from the public eye in the weeks after Gerry and Kate were made arguidos - or official suspects.

The pair left Portugal without saying goodbye and handed the church keys to another clergyman.

Last week, police moved in to search the churchyard and there has been some suggestion that they may consider digging for Madeleine's body at the location.

Father Pacheco, runs two churches and teaches at three local schools, yesterday broke his silence.

According to the Daily Express, he admitted he had become too close to the couple, still official suspects in the disappearance of their daughter.

"I was deceived," he said.

"I was just doing my job supporting lost souls. I would do that with any family who were in their situation. I didn't do anything wrong.

Father Pacheco, 46, said he had felt compelled to help Kate and Gerry because of their "inconsolable grief".

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-488262/I-deceived-says-Portuguese-priest-comforted-Gerry-Kate-McCann.html

Madeleine's parents invited to Vatican for private meeting with Pope

Thair Shaikh: 29th May 2007

The parents of missing four-year-old Madeleine McCann have been invited to the Vatican to meet the Pope tomorrow, a spokesman for the family said.

Kate and Gerry McCann will have a private meeting with Pope Benedict XVI tomorrow morning at the end of a general audience meeting in the Vatican.

The couple will fly to Rome this afternoon from Faro on a 12-seater Gulfstream jet owned by the businessman Sir Philip Green. The meeting will be particularly significant for the couple because they have drawn strength from their Catholic faith since their daughter disappeared on May 3 and have attended church regularly. Last week they visited the Fatima shrine, one of the holiest in the Catholic world.

Clarence Mitchell, a spokesman for the McCann family, said both parents were delighted that "this important spiritual support had been afforded to them", and that Mrs McCann would give the Pope a photograph of Madeleine.

He added that although they were grateful of Sir Philip's offer to let them use his private jet, they would only use it on this one occasion.

Yesterday the McCann family visited a 75 sq metre (800 sq ft) inflatable poster of Madeleine that will be taken around the Algarve in an attempt to publicise her plight further. The poster, which highlights a £1.5m reward being offered through the News of the World, was paid for by Chris Lennox and Les Harley, two advertising professionals from Glasgow, who drove it 2,200 miles from Scotland to Praia da Luz.In a statement read out near the poster, the McCanns said they were amazed by the support they has received. "We have thanked everyone on several occasions but, you know, some people are just going to absolutely extraordinary lengths to help us," the statement said.

"We'd like to again thank the thousands, if not millions, of people who are doing little things in their own way - either making donations to the fund, distributing posters, taking posters on holiday - anything that people are doing to raise the awareness of Madeleine's disappearance."

The couple also released two short film clips of their daughter yesterday, taken by a family friend on their mobile phone on April 28. They show Madeleine clambering up the steps to the aircraft at East Midlands airport and later sitting on a shuttle bus at Faro airport. Mr McCann said his daughter had been so excited about the holiday that she had barely complained when she tripped and grazed her shin.

"She was dead excited about going away with the rest of the kids, it was her first time to Portugal," he said.

Meanwhile, Portuguese police said they have received hundreds of calls after they released a description of a man seen near the McCanns's holiday flat at about the time Madeleine is thought to have gone missing. He is described as white, 5ft 10in, medium build with short hair.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/may/29/ukcrime.catholicism
....................

The McCanns were not invited to the Vatican, at least not as suggested by ^^^ - nor did they have a private audience with the pontiff.

They were there by private arrangement between their spindoctor Clarence Mitchell and the disgraced Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, RIH , for a front row seat when the supreme pontiff was pontifficating with his customary laying on of hands. Mitchell was nigh on tripping over his own drool trying to get particular attention for his friends/clients..



Nobody but nobody would put their neck on the block if they weren't 100% secure.

Pay careful attention to this report, in particular note the date it was published.  Just after Gerry McCann's first trip to the UK following Madeleine's disappearance and just before the Irish witness came forward with tales of sighting a possible abductor..

MADDY COPS 'FAILED BASICS'


POLICE probing the kidnap of Madeleine McCann made basic errors, a child protection expert said yesterday.

Martin Fricker:  24th May 2007

POLICE probing the kidnap of Madeleine McCann made basic errors, a child protection expert said yesterday.

Accusing them of failing to complete the fundamental "building blocks", former detective Mark Williams-Thomas said: "It was the worst preserved crime scene I've ever seen."

Mr Williams-Thomas hit out as it emerged that there is NO evidence to link sole suspect Robert Murat with the disappearance three weeks ago of Madeleine, four.

The expert visited the kidnap scene in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz in the early stages of the inquiry.

Mr Williams-Thomas said local detectives failed to cordon off the wider crime scene.

In doing so, they blew the "best possible chance" of collecting vital evidence.

He said: "The first 24 hours are absolutely vital. This major window of opportunity was lost because of failings."

That police had not yet questioned all potential witnesses, including those staying nearby, was "inexcusable", he said.
The case against Murat, 33, looks on the verge of collapse. After DNA tests, a police source said: "There's not the slightest proof he was involved.


"We've examined hair, sweat residue and clothing. Nothing links him."

Genetic profiles were taken from evidence at the McCanns' holiday apartment.

None matches the DNA of Briton Murat or his Russian business associate Sergey Malinka, 22, who has been grilled. Amazingly, police have not taken a sample of Madeleine's DNA, even though it could easily be obtained from a toothbrush or hairbrush.

Instead, they created a DNA profile from parents Kate and Gerry McCann, both 38, of Rothley, Leics.

There will be further DNA tests. The National Institute of Legal Medicine, said: "We can only draw conclusions once analyses are completed."

Officers yesterday questioned Murat's lover, German-born Michaela Walczuch, for a second time.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/maddy-cops-failed-basics-477383

Master of media circus for Madeleine McCann

Clarence Mitchell is not backward about coming forward for Gerry and Kate McCann.

24th April 2008

The first anniversary of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann will be marked next week with a two-hour television documentary which is the highlight of a carefully stage-managed publicity offensive.

The fly-on-the wall documentary on ITV1 of Gerry and Kate McCann has been organised by Clarence Mitchell, their official spokesman. The Portuguese press first referred to him as the "man in the shadows" when he took the job full-time in Praia da Luz in September.

The newspapers were reporting the (as usual) private views of the Portuguese police that Mitchell, 47, had been sent in by Gordon Brown, no less – when he was Chancellor – to spy on the investigation, which had been portrayed in Britain as amateur and cack-handed.

But the Portuguese media were wrong on both counts. Mitchell would have had at best only a nodding acquaintance with junior ministers, let alone Mr Brown. As director of media monitoring at the Central Office of Information, he was a back room boy but has never been in the shadows of the police operation.

The former BBC television reporter has loved being centre stage before the cameras in an investigation that has transfixed the world's media. "He is on the TV much more than he ever was when he worked for the BBC," said one former colleague.

So much so that photographers regularly have to shout at Mitchell to get out of the way when they are taking pictures of the McCanns. He remains at his fixed point by their shoulder even during photo-shoots, bucking the trend of media minders who avoid being photographed at all costs.

Mitchell has become such a familiar figure in his open-necked pink shirts that he is recognised in the street and is stopped so often on the forecourts of petrol stations that he now jokes it is because he has forgotten to pay his bill.

After almost 30 years as a journalist, he knows what makes a story and has been extraordinarily successful in maintaining a strong interest in Madeleine.

When interest has faltered he has invariably constructed a story or recruited a big name – even the American First Lady, Laura Bush, is on-side – to a campaign driven by parents who accepted early on that the media was a necessary partner.

Nevertheless, the documentary next Wednesday has provoked controversy because ITV1 has scheduled it against the BBC's The Apprentice as part of its ratings war.

The move has led to the accusation that Mitchell has allowed the parents to be exploited by a commercial broadcaster. The fact that Mentorn, the production company making the programme, has given £10,000 to the Find Madeleine fund has not diminished the fuss: the money will be more than recouped from syndication.

ITV1, with the help of Mitchell, has kept other media organisations from the McCanns during the five weeks of the access deal with Mentorn. The company has secured unseen footage of Mrs McCann, 40, her husband, 39, and their three-year-old twins behind the door of their home in Rothley, Leics.

It includes Mrs McCann breaking down in tears as she recalls the night Madeleine went missing. But Mitchell will be undeterred by the barbs, believing the two-hour documentary the best way to ensure that the search for Madeleine goes global again. This is what he is paid to do.

He always wanted to be a journalist and after O-levels at Friern Barnet School, Finchley, where he was head boy, he joined the Barnet & Potters Bar Times and then a BBC training scheme.

In a varied career he covered the Soham murders and, for two years from 2003, the Iraq war.

He was also on the royal beat when he was known – not very imaginatively – as "Clarence House". But it was as a presenter on various BBC news programmes that he hoped to make his career after years on the road. His spell doing hourly bulletins on News 24 is best remembered for him sleeping through a 3am slot, which had to be filled by a somewhat dishevelled producer. He became close to the McCanns after being sent twice by the Foreign Office to look after them when there were 40 camera crews outside their Portuguese apartment.

As a father of three children, aged two to 11, he has gone through the same agonies as many other parents who feared it could have happened to them. His £70,000 salary, equivalent to what he earned in the Civil Service, is being paid by the double-glazing magnate Brian Kennedy, who has bankrolled much of the McCann campaign.

Surrendering his Civil Service pension will be compensated by the future benefits of his role in helping to make Madeleine's the most heavily reported missing-person case in modern history. Offers are coming in for book, broadcast, and lecture circuit opportunities when he returns to "ordinary life" – and even Mohamed Fayed is rumoured to be interested in hiring him.

Mitchell divides his time between his home in Bath, London, and Rothley and speaks to the McCanns every day. They are grateful to him for raising the profile of the search across Europe and North Africa, through visits to Morocco, Italy, Spain and Germany. But the revelation that they were flying in a private jet was a bear trap that Mitchell should have spotted, and the couple flew home from a trip to Portugal on easyJet.

Mitchell was, as usual, only a few feet away from the couple when they met the Pope in St Peter's Square. He was so overcome he reached out to grasp the papal hand and was rewarded with a blessing and a set of rosary beads from one of the priests in the Pontiff's retinue.

While calm in public, he has often blown up behind the scenes at reporters and is occasionally guilty of overdoing briefings.

In the last few weeks his public approach has changed, bluntly blaming the Portugese police for leaking statements from Mr and Mrs McCann that revealed Madeleine was left crying the night before she vanished.

Mitchell moved from the shadows to being branded a "manipulative liar" by the police and the row ensured once more that the McCanns returned to front pages across Europe. It was a job well done by the man at the centre of the story in his own right.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1902515/Master-of-media-circus-for-Madeleine-McCann.html

I'm guessing the legal action against Gonçalo Amaral instigated by team McCann, was a very elaborate scheme to divert attention from the more damning PJ files, realeased into the public domain during the same period.  A veiled attempt to discredit the PJ investigation by discrediting the case coordinator.

 


How the discrediting of former top cop helps shut down damning Madeleine McCann theories


By Mark Saunokonoko
2:02pm May 3, 2017


Crusading hero to many and vindictive villain to others, the figure of Goncalo Amaral is almost as much a part of the Madeleine McCann story as her parents, Kate and Gerry.

Amaral was the original supervising detective in the Maddie McCann case, an unsolved mystery which has captivated the world since Portuguese police were called at 10.41pm on May 3, 2007.

That first phone call, made some 41 minutes after Kate McCann claimed to have discovered Maddie was missing, sparked a 15-month police investigation that came under the most extraordinary media and political pressures.

Five months into the investigation, and following the naming of Kate and Gerry as suspects in the disappearance of their four-year-old daughter, Amaral found himself removed from the case.

However, Amaral sensationally reappeared just days after the Portuguese police investigation was eventually shelved in July 2008, with an explosive book that was hugely damaging to the McCanns.

His 22-chapter account, titled Truth of the Lie, concluded Maddie had probably died in some kind of accident inside holiday apartment 5A, that an abduction was staged and her tiny body had been disposed of by Kate and Gerry.

The McCanns launched an expensive and protracted legal battle, using money from the millions of dollars donated to the Find Madeleine Fund, to have Amaral's personal account of the investigation banned.

Initially the McCanns succeeded, before a 2016 court tossed that decision out and ruled that the injunction had violated Amaral's freedom of expression.


Throughout the investigation, and continuing to the present day, Amaral, now aged 57, has been continuously and methodically mauled by the British tabloids and to a lesser extent various UK broadsheets.

Amaral's supporters believe the ongoing assassination of his character and policing methods helps shape the perception that his theories must be wild and fanciful.

A man named Clarence Mitchell, a former British government media mastermind, has been the key strategist in the McCann's meticulous public relations campaign for each of the 10 years since Maddie vanished.

Over the past week, as the milestone tenth anniversary of Madeleine's approached, maneuverings to discredit Amaral were once again evident in the pages of the powerful and wide-reaching UK red tops.


Two high profile stories which ran this week in The Sun and The Mirror both painted Amaral as a kind of crackpot.

The first attributed quotes to Amaral about Maddie being secretly placed inside a coffin with a dead body which was later cremated; the second pushed Amaral's supposed belief that British spy agency MI5 had helped hide Maddie's body.

Amaral, in both instances, was selectively edited and his comments were twisted out of context.

The former cop has previously spoken about the cremated coffin and related police information about three figures seen entering a church in Praia da Luz carrying a bag.

In a 2016 interview on CMTV, he confirmed the McCanns were given keys to the local church, close to where the family was staying. Inside there was a coffin of an adult woman that was later incinerated.

During the TV appearance Amaral explained that all possible angles of a missing persons case should be explored by detectives.
"No one is saying that the parents did that [put Madeleine's body in the coffin]," he said.

The startling claim that spooks from MI5 helped hide Madeleine's body is another disturbing manipulation of the truth.


The facts are in the days following Maddie's disappearance the UK government made the remarkably unusual step of becoming closely involved in another sovereign nation's police investigation.

British police were sent to Portugal to assist, while the British ambassador to Portugal and other officials also arrived in Praia Da Luz within 48 hours of Madeleine being reported missing.


A former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan and ex Foreign Office civil servant, Craig Murray, publicly questioned "the exceptional treatment from British authorities" for the McCanns.

"British diplomatic staff were under direct instruction to support the McCanns far beyond the usual and to put pressure on the Portuguese authorities over the case," Murray wrote in an April, 2016 blog post.

"I have direct information that more than one of those diplomatic staff found the McCanns less than convincing and their stories inconsistent.

"Embassy staff were perturbed to be ordered that British authorities were to be present at every contact between the McCanns and Portuguese police."


There were criticisms that the Policia Judiciaria were leaking rumours and unsubstantiated facts of the case to Portuguese journalists, while starving the hungry British press corp.

Ian Woods, a Sky News reporter on the ground in Praia Da Luz, explained how that dynamic divided the British and Portuguese journalists, creating an 'us' and 'them' agenda.

"For the first few weeks or months the British media were largely pro-McCann and the Portuguese media seemed largely anti-McCann," Woods wrote in a [url=https://bdigital.ufp.pt/bitstream/10284/1465/2/DM_ JoanaSantos.pdf]2009 study[/url] examining media coverage of the case.

As the days ticked over into weeks, and with no sign of Maddie's return, the British press began to attack the way the investigation was handled.

On reflection, Amaral has admitted the Portuguese investigation, inevitably, made mistakes.

One of his biggest regrets, he said, was not immediately putting surveillance traces on Kate and Gerry's phones.

Amaral also lamented the failure of police to immediately obtain the clothes Maddie had worn at the resort crèche on the day she disappeared.

The McCanns have not ruled out trying to again ban The Truth of the Lie by taking the legal fight with Amaral all the way to the European Court of Human Rights.

Meanwhile, rumours have circulated that Amaral is planning a second book.

Ten years on, Madeleine Beth McCann remains missing.

https://www.9news.com.au/world/2017/05/03/14/02/how-discrediting-former-top-cop-helps-shut-down-damning-madeleine-mccann-theories

Tch tch tch Mr Saunokonko I thought you were an advocate of truth, not a propagator of misinformation.

9th October 2007

McCann children 'were not alone in apartment'

Significant new evidence about the night Madeleine McCann disappeared has been uncovered, it was claimed, as one of Portugal’s most senior detectives took charge of the investigation.

Paulo Rebelo, an assistant national director of the PJ, took over responsibility for the case last night. He made his name in the investigation into Portugal’s most notorious paedophile ring.

His appointment was made amid reports in Portugal that detectives have evidence contradicting Kate and Gerry McCann's version of the events of the night that they reported their daughter missing.

Police believe that Madeleine and her twin brother and sister may not have been alone in the McCann holiday apartment, but that the children of seven British friends who were on holiday with the McCanns were also present when Madeleine disappeared on May 3, the 24 Horas newspaper claimed.

The McCanns, from Rothley, Leicestershire, have insisted that Madeleine was with only her two-year-old twin siblings, Sean and Amelie, while they dined with their friends at a tapas restaurant at the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz. The group has claimed that their children were in their own apartments and that they made checks on their own children and those of their friends during the evening.

However, a source within the investigation was quoted by 24 Horas as saying: “It’s not only the collected evidence that points to the fact that there were more children inside that [the McCanns'] apartment.

“Evidence also exists, following the interrogations to the other people who that were at the Ocean Club, that only the McCanns’ apartment was visited by the people who attended the dinner.”

The children had visited each other’s apartments regularly in the six days that they had been at the Ocean Club. The newspaper does not explain how any forensic evidence could be pinpointed to the evening of Madeleine’s disappearance.

The newspaper also casts doubt on claims by one of the McCanns’ friends that he was looking after his unwell daughter when he was away from the restaurant on the evening Madeleine disappeared.

It says that Russell O’Brien, a hospital consultant from Exeter, left the restaurant at 9.35pm and returned at 10pm, just minutes before Mrs McCann discovered that Madeleine was missing. Mr O’Brien has strenuously denied any involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance and has never been a formal suspect in the investigation.

24 Horas reported: “The British man guaranteed he took that long because he visited his sick daughter, and she vomited. He says he asked for the sheets to be changed, but the staff at the Ocean Club assured the investigators that nobody asked for any bedsheets to be changed that evening.”

Mr O’Brien’s partner, Jane Tanner, told police that she had seen a man carrying a girl away from the McCanns’ apartment at 9.15pm. However, another witness has insisted that she was not in the area at that time.

A source within the PJ is quoted by 24 Horas as saying: “In face of so many contradictions and in face of the forensics results that we already hold, we have very few doubts that the girl died inside that apartment, and we only have doubts about who concealed the corpse.”

The report follows claims in the British media that although tests on samples discovered in the McCanns’ apartment and hire car do not prove that Madeleine is dead, they have strengthened the theory that her parents were involved in her disappearance.

A source at the Forensic Science Service in Birmingham, which carried out the tests on behalf of the Portuguese authorities, is reported to have said that the results showed police were right to make the couple arguidos, or official suspects.

However, the McCanns’ British law firm, Kingsley Napley, has brought in its own forensic team to explain why the samples may be totally unconnected to Madeleine’s disappearance.

The couple insist that any DNA found in the Renault Scenic hired 25 days after Madeleine’s disappearance could have been transferred innocently from their daughter’s clothing when they moved to a new apartment.

Clarence Mitchell, the couple’s spokesman, said today: “Kate and Gerry have nothing to hide at all. They are perfectly happy to answer any of this, if it comes to it. There are wholly innocent explanations for anything the police may or may not have found."

Mr Mitchell said the couple were unable to grieve for Madeleine because they did not know yet what had happened to their daughter. “They need that knowledge whether Madeleine is alive or dead - let’s face it, she might be,” he said. “They need to know, before they can move on, before they can deal with that.

“In the absence of that hard information, they are doing what they can to, one, clear their names of these dreadful smears and, two, to actually get on with the job of finding her. That is the message we want to go to police in Portugal - ‘find Madeleine’.”
The couple hope that the appointment of a new head of the investigation will refocus the inquiry on finding their daughter. Mr Rebelo was appointed last night after the demotion of the previous lead investigator, Gonçalo Amaral, who had claimed that British police were being manipulated by Madeleine’s parents.

Mr Rebelo made his career at the Central Directory for the Investigation of Drug Trafficking before being appointed one of four associate directors of the PJ. He was head of the Criminal Investigation department in Lisbon when it uncovered a notorious paedophile ring. The “Casa Pia” ring had been abusing boys at state-run children’s homes for decades before being uncovered in 2002. Those alleged to have been involved included senior politicians, a former ambassador, celebrities and wealthy businessmen.

Mr Rebelo was described by colleagues as “highly regarded internally, he has done some excellent work for the PJ, he is nice and a good communicator”. He is close to the PJ’s national director, Alipio Ribeiro.



https://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t15658-madeleine-mccann-investigators-join-detectives-at-scene-of-suzy-lamplugh-search#392992

Madeleine

Headlines, hate mail and Kate McCann.

2nd June 2011

One May afternoon in 2007 in Praia da Luz, Portugal, barely 48 hours before their daughter Madeleine disappeared, Kate and Gerry McCann took their three young children down to the beach. It began to rain, and the children were grumpy, but the promise of an ice cream worked its magic.
Kate and the kids sat on a bench as Gerry went over to the shop, about 25 feet away. When he called to Kate to come and give him a hand with the five ice creams, she was "momentarily torn. Would the children be OK on the bench while I nipped over? I hurried across, watching them all the time."

Life as a parent, as anyone with children knows, is crammed with such split-second judgements and (sometimes) misjudgements, so when the McCanns' story hit the press just a couple of days after that afternoon ice cream, parents all over the world caught their breath, recognising the situation. Would we have chosen to eat dinner while our children slept, unguarded, a matter of yards away? Some of us would, some of us wouldn't, but I doubt there is a parent on this earth who hasn't negotiated with their child's safety in similar ways at one time or another.

Kate McCann says her main motive in writing Madeleine was to "give an account of the truth". Given how much false information has been circulated about the family, this impulse to exert a little control excites my full sympathy. One night, exhausted and sad, she switched
on the TV for light relief, only to see a picture of her daughter with the headline "She's dead" as the following day's newspapers were previewed. The McCanns often felt that they were kept in the dark by the police, so, for all she knew, a body could have been found - but time and again, she and Gerry were forced to pick their battles, to shrug off the lorryloads of critical comment, because anything that impeded the search for their daughter had to be ignored.

Much of the comment certainly has been negative. Even now, I am not sure I understand how the McCanns came to be considered as arguidos (named suspects). Although I imagine that the Portuguese police would offer a different version of some of the events described here, no UK official believed that the McCanns were in any way responsible for their daughter's disappearance. That didn't stop the headlines and the hate mail, however, so it seems both understandable that Kate should want to take this opportunity to set the record straight and fair that she should do so.

Yet the book clearly has another reason for existing: Kate wrote it because she knew that there was a market for it. The search for Mad­eleine can continue only if there is money, and all royalties go to the fund set up in her name. With no evidence that their daughter is dead, the McCanns are determined to go on looking. Meanwhile, it's a particularly gruesome limbo they are condemned to inhabit. Kate depicts it here with chilling precision.

Before tragedy struck, this was an ordinary family. Kate tells of her happy Catholic childhood in Liverpool, where her grandad had been "chief clerk for a firm importing nuts and dried fruits". She recalls midnight feasts of pickled onion crisps and dancing to Seventies disco hits. Then came Gerry, youngest in a "boisterous" family of five, growing up in a one-bedroom tenement in Govan. Both he and Kate did well at school and went on to study medicine, she at Dundee and he at Glasgow - which is where, as junior doctors, they met.

These were clearly hard-working and driven young people. Even so, their early married years were tough. There was the hard graft of moving between jobs as he trained in cardiology. She specialised as an anaesthetist, but, wanting more sociable hours, eventually opted to be a GP. Then there was the trying - and failing - to conceive a child. I was startled to read that all three McCann children were IVF babies. Mad­eleine, their first, arrived after many attempts. "Suddenly," Kate writes, "your world revolves around this little bundle, and you don't mind in the slightest."

Madeleine is crammed with clichés of this kind, but I confess that, far from bothering me, they drew me in. Kate McCann is not a writer and makes no claims to be one - the power of her book lies in its straightforward, chatty ordinariness. It is hard, too, not to admire its complete lack of self-pity, bolstered by the McCanns' uncomplicated though sorely tested religious faith. The agony lies in the small, casual detail.

Take how, when friends first suggested a spring holiday in the Algarve, Kate wasn't keen. It seemed like a lot of effort, with three children who were so small - all that equipment to lug around. But, not wanting to spoil things, she came round to the idea. "It was the first in a series of apparently minor decisions I'd give anything to change now."

Another factor was how and where they put their children down to sleep at the resort. The McCanns' apartment was on a corner with easy access from the street. It is now considered likely that someone was keeping an eye on their comings and goings. And it wasn't until a whole year later, when finally they were given access to the police files, that Kate discovered that anyone checking the book at reception would have seen a note stating that the McCann party wished to eat in the tapas restaurant every night because they were leaving young children alone in the apartments and needed to be able to check on them easily.

The story of how Madeleine went missing need not be repeated here, but the book gives us what the press never could: a sense of the misery of that first night and those that followed. The slow breaking of dawn, followed by the sickening job of telling the news to relatives in the UK. Kate's inability to stop banging and bruising her fists on the metal railings of the veranda, "trying to expel the intolerable pain inside me". Gerry breaking down and "roaring like a bull".

The McCanns were soon, and wisely, given access to a trauma specialist, who immediately reassured the couple that they seemed like model parents. "I cannot overstate how much such kind reassurance meant to us at that moment," Kate writes. He explained to them the importance of taking control little by little, "starting with tiny actions as simple as making ourselves a cup of tea".

In fact, kindness and forgiveness - being gentle with yourself in the face of unrelenting shock - is the core, though perhaps unwitting, theme of Kate McCann's book. Her husband was able to shut off his pain for hours at a time in order to deal with the world - something that she admits she occasionally resented. With touching self-awareness, she describes how she could not do the same. She was unable to settle to anything that did not relate directly to finding Madeleine: "I could not even sit down unless it was for a purpose, to eat or to work at the computer."

She conjures a heartbreaking image of the bereft mother, condemned to pace up and down eternally, sniffing for her young. It was two years before she could listen to music or watch television, or allow herself to take pleasure in anything at all without feeling that she was letting her daughter down.

Hugging friends whom she hadn't seen since before Madeleine disappeared, she would find she could "hardly bear to let go", because she knew that the moment she stepped back and saw their faces, she would be reminded of "days spent together with Madeleine". She also says candidly that her sex life with Gerry suffered and that she finally took "a cognitive approach" to getting it back on track.

Years later, even beginning to feel more normal brings its own problems. She worries about what people will think if they see her speaking crossly to her other children in public. Or that, if "people saw me smile or laugh, they'd think it inappropriate". She has a fear that if anyone spots her shopping in Marks & Spencer, they will frown on her "for not going somewhere cheaper like Aldi and putting the pennies saved into Madeleine's fund".

If Kate McCann doesn't feel she deserves to be forgiven, it is striking nevertheless that this is a boldly empathetic and forgiving book. She writes without bitterness about the people whose correspondence goes straight into the "nutty box".

As doctors, she and Gerry have some professional experience of dealing with mental illness, and are not surprised that their tragedy attracts such attention - "within days of Madeleine's disappearance, several people with major psychiatric problems made their way over to Praia da Luz". And although the trauma specialist had warned them that they would lose some good friends (and they did), she is grateful for the "quiet majority". Astonishingly, perhaps, she still believes that "most human beings are inherently good".

Even though I am sure there is a readership for Madeleine, many others will feel free to discuss and comment on the book without having read it. I would urge them to be as kind and non-judgemental as Kate McCann has been. Although she and Gerry come across as remarkably strong - clearly their love for their two remaining children, together with the search for Madeleine, has kept them going - I don't think anyone should underestimate how vulnerable they are.

To endure tragedy of this sort, followed by relentless press attention, leaves you raw, your skin feeling stripped right off. One night almost a year after they lost Madeleine, the couple woke in the night in Leicester to find the whole room shaking. "With the occasional death threat turning up in our morning mail, it is perhaps not surprising that our first instinct was to think we were being attacked."

Thankfully the "attack" turned out to be an earth tremor. You hope for the McCanns' sake that, whether or not they ever discover what happened to their daughter, the agonising rawness - like the tremor - will eventually subside to nothing.

https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2011/05/kate-mccann-madeleine-children

The lightening struck the thunder roared and all the world was shaking, the little pig curled up his tail and ran to save his bacon.

All roads lead to his Paypalness..

‘It’s likely to be painful’: Madeleine McCann’s 10th anniversary
A decade of reporting without ‘conscience’ has persecuted the missing child’s parents

29th April 2017



Wednesday, May 3rd , marks 10 years since three-year-old Madeleine McCann vanished from a Portuguese holiday apartment while her parents dined with friends in a tapas bar about 50m away.

Ten years of a relentless search for a child by her parents, by three police forces, by a slew of private investigators. Ten years of tabloid splashes and libel suits, of suspects fingered, cleared or never traced; of books, documentaries and pet theories. Ten years of blame games.

Few issues flush out more self-righteous bile than other people’s parenting. From the earliest days, one thing has remained constant: the public vilification and online persecution of the missing child’s parents, Kate and Gerry McCann.

Ten years on, tweets critical of the couple continue to roll in at a furious rate. According to a recent pilot study of online trolling, tweets with the hashtag #McCann were averaging 100 an hour.

“It doesn’t ever stop. Somewhere in the world, someone is doing this. . .and you’re either with them or against them,” says Dr John Synnott, a Dubliner and senior lecturer in investigative psychology who led the study at the University of Huddersfield.

The anti-McCanns are bound by a common goal: to prove Kate and Gerry McCann guilty of their daughter’s disappearance.

A distinguishing feature of the so-called anti-McCanns is their organisation and in-group bonding. Operating in what the academic calls an “anti-social network”, the group has a strong female presence and many have made this part of their identity, the first thing they do when they wake up and to which they devote inordinate time.

As such, they do not regard themselves as “trolls”, he says, rather “as campaigners, as seekers of justice, as proprietors of morality”.

The bigger picture of the study is that Twitter – unlike Facebook – facilitates anonymity. Posters can hide their true identities for the most part, and as such may engage with impunity in casual savagery of word and tone.

The anti-McCanns are bound by a common goal: to prove Kate and Gerry McCann guilty of their daughter’s disappearance. In this hostile online environment, anyone who argues otherwise is a “shill”, in the paid employ of the McCanns and/or is engaged in a criminal cover-up with a sinister media, government and justice complex to protect paedophiles.

The anti-McCanns’ pin-up is Gonçalo Amaral, the 57-year-old Portuguese lead investigator who was taken off the case in 2007 after giving an interview criticising the British police. Amaral’s 2008 book, which earned him £344,000 (€407,000) according to the British Sun, drew a civil lawsuit for damages from the McCanns who were awarded £430,000 plus interest in damages. This was overturned on appeal, and the Portuguese Supreme Court went on to uphold Amaral’s right to freedom of expression.

Almost forgotten in this social-media free-for-all is the child who would turn 14 on Friday week, whose strikingly pretty, blonde and blue-eyed image is still given the splash treatment over and over to illustrate the latest crackpot theory .
Class conquers everything

Why, of all the missing person cases reported each year, Madeleine McCann’s exploded into the public consciousness and remained there, is no mystery.

Social class overarches everything, says Prof Roy Greenslade, of City University London, a Guardian media commentator and a former editor of the Daily Mirror.

“It played a part in two ways. Initially, the idea of a middle-class professional couple with a lost child probably got more publicity than a working-class child would have. But then it turned in a classist way – ‘okay, can we believe everything they say?’

“It became a contest, putting the couple almost on trial, asking various questions which would be legitimate for a policeman to ask in the privacy of an interview room, but tough to be asked continually, in public, with every bizarre theory explored.”

The suggestion that the McCanns were complicit in their daughter’s disappearance was bounced around with impunity until the couple sued the Daily Express for libel and won £550,000 (plus £375, 000 for the so-called Tapas Seven, their holiday companions).



Greenslade believes they could have sued virtually all the tabloids. “It was no surprise to me that they were key witnesses in the Leveson [hacking] inquiry. They really had a point.”

The McCanns were not alone in getting damages from a story-hungry media. The first arguido or official suspect was a Portuguese property consultant called Robert Murat, whose home was searched 12 days after Madeleine’s disappearance. After being formally cleared in 2008 , he won £600,000 in libel damages from 11 British papers.



Yet, editors “really never appreciated how badly they acted”, says Greenslade. They had paid their fines, they argued, and everyone else was doing it. Peter Hill, the then Daily Express editor, told Greenslade after the libel case: “It was a huge story, and every adult in the country had an opinion on it. I admit it helped to sell the paper.
Vile theories

“There were many factors involved, such as the way Maddy’s parents sought publicity in an unprecedented way. All the way through, our principal focus was on ‘what’s happened to Maddy?’ The Portuguese police and British legal sources were leaking stories that implied the McCanns were guilty in some way. We were not to know that the Portuguese police were ineffectual.”

“It was disgraceful”, says Greenslade, “thinking they were engaged in legitimate journalism, when most of the stories emanated from dodgy Portuguese sources and were then repeated by papers that hadn’t checked them out.”

It was this behaviour, Greenslade contends, that “supported the level of vilification that hit the McCanns from the public, that gave licence to people to air their vile theories”.

A few months after Madeleine’s disappearance and before social media had taken a foothold, Greenslade attended a seminar at the London School of Economics, chaired by the BBC’s Steve Hewlett. He was astonished at the “vile” nature of the questions and the way they were put by some audience members.

“It was as if human trolls had turned up, suggesting the parents were guilty either of murdering the child or of abandoning the child. It was like being in front of a mob – and you realised there is no wisdom in the mob. Ever. And it’s been terrible since.

“[Journalists’] job is to keep these things in the front of the public eye, absolutely. But it’s the way it’s done in this case that is beyond the pale”.

Since Madeleine McCann’s disappearance, there have been 8,685 reported sightings of her across 101 countries, including Belgium, New Zealand, Brazil, Bosnia, Sweden, Holland, India and Malta and many more.

Theories propounded by contributors to a documentary aired by Australia’s Channel 7 this week suggest that Madeleine was kidnapped by a human-trafficking gang “working to order”, that she was stolen by a paedophile gang and could still be alive, that she had been roaming around looking for her parents on the street and was run over by a drunk driver who hid her body in one of 600 wells.

Much of the programme reflects the theory-heavy nature of coverage of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance.

Prof Dave Barclay, a senior lecturer in forensic science at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, also appeared on the documentary. “I’m sure the reason this case has run as long as it has and still arouses fantastic interest even now is because every single one of the explanations, the possible explanations, is implausible, and yet we know one of them must be correct,” he said.

“It might be solved if Madeleine’s body is found and there is evidence either on the body or in the location where the body is found that would point to somebody but otherwise, I don’t think it will ever be solved.

“There is just no physical evidence whatsoever that we can use at this time, even to eliminate some of the theories.”

The early stages of the search for Madeleine McCann ensured there would be no physical evidence.

Early suspects

It took hours for border guards to be alerted and for roadblocks to be put in place, and several days for a global missing person alert to be issued by Interpol.

As well as that, vital evidence was probably destroyed that night by the failure to close off the crime scene, allowing some 20 people to roam through the rooms and the yard.

Kate and Gerry McCann became early suspects. The police theory was that they accidentally killed Madeline sometime after the last independent sighting of her at 6pm, possibly by a sedative overdose. According to this theory, they concealed the body, faked the abduction and, nearly a month later, transported her body in a hire car to dispose of it.

This avenue of investigation had the effect of taking the heat off the police but also meant vital early evidence was ignored.

A hint of the prejudice and hypocrisy inflicted on Kate and Gerry McCann from both police and media is contained in the Daily Express editor’s part-explanation of his actions, that “Maddy’s parents sought publicity in an unprecedented way”.

The police, accustomed to absolute secrecy, were outraged at the couple’s use of the media to raise awareness.

Kate McCann’s stoicism, her grimly maintained jogging routine, and refusal to claw the earth in remorse for her admitted parenting mistakes were deemed proof that she was not a natural mother.

‘Cold and manipulative’

Leaks from within the investigation claimed that her controlled public appearance, even her carefully applied make-up, indicated a “cold and manipulative” personality. Portuguese police suspected her from the very beginning because they could not believe parents would leave their children unattended.

Gerry McCann explained that he and his wife had been advised that self-control might have most impact on a putative kidnapper tuning into their many television appeals. She continued to give tearless, self-flagellating interviews, admitting their mistakes and revealing that their three, much-wanted babies were the result of IVF treatment.

Their choice was stark: give up the search and with it the foul rumours, suspicion, malice and abuse; or continue to ride the media tiger in the hope it would flush out information about Madeleine.

In July, the pressure was piled on when two British sniffer dogs – Eddy and Keela – were brought in. One was trained to sniff out traces of human blood, the other to scent corpses. The dogs raised alerts in the McCanns’ apartment and their hire car.

Though Portuguese police told journalists the DNA tests were a “100 per cent match” for Madeleine, they were in fact, inconclusive. In September 2007, the McCanns were named arguidos. It was almost a year before they were declared no longer suspect by the Portuguese attorney general, and the investigation was archived due to a lack of evidence. It was reopened in 2013, led by a team of officers in Porto.

At that stage, any sensible pair of killers would have breathed a sigh of relief and let the story die. Instead the McCanns pursued a loud, relentless, multimillion-euro global campaign to keep the investigation alive. They set up the Leaving No Stone Unturned campaign, distinguished by its quasi-corporate professionalism, with media professionals, full-time private investigators, travel packs for people going on holidays, 24-hour multilingual call centre and ubiquitous posters.

Their efforts ensured that Madeleine’s case remained live to the point that in 2011, the then British home secretary, Theresa May, announced a review of the evidence by Scotland Yard. After revelations that possible key sightings and artists’ impressions of suspects had been kept from the public for years, that became a full, £10 million criminal inquiry in 2013, to concentrate, said the police pointedly, on a “criminal act by a stranger”.

Chief among those unpublicised sightings was one by an Irish couple, who saw a man 500 yards from the McCann apartment at about 10pm, awkwardly carrying a child matching Madeleine’s description towards the beach. E-fits of him were released in 2013 to coincide with a BBC Crimewatch reconstruction, and he remains a suspect.

Just as usefully, police were able to eliminate a well-publicised prime suspect, a man seen by one of the “Tapas Seven” close to 10pm, carrying a small child in pink pyjamas. Only in 2013 was he revealed to be a British holidaymaker taking his daughter back from the Ocean Club’s evening creche.
Abduction or burglary

Among those being tracked by police at that stage were bogus charity collectors seen knocking on doors in the area and who may have been doing reconnaissance for either an abduction or a burglary, plus a number of fair-haired men, seen loitering suspiciously close to the McCann’s apartment all that day.

Separately, four suspects were questioned on suspicion of being part of a burglary gang that possibly panicked after accidentally killing Madeleine – a prime theory – but they were released.

Mobile phone tracking showed that Euclides Monteiro, a convicted burglar with a drug habit, who had been sacked from the Ocean Club the year before, was also in the area that night. Though he died in a tractor accident in 2009, Portuguese police reopened the investigation later when he was identified as a suspect.

And apparently, leads remain. London Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley said this week that police had no definitive evidence as to whether Madeleine was alive or dead.

“Where we are today is with a much smaller team focused on a small number of remaining critical lines of inquiry that we think are significant. If we didn’t think they were significant, we wouldn’t be carrying on.”
Crime in the Algarve

One of the most startling aspects of the case is the crime context in the Algarve. Between 2004 and 2010, there had been 12 crimes where an intruder broke into the properties of UK families, within a 60km radius of the McCanns’ resort, including two in Praia da Luz itself.

In six of those, the intruder either got into bed with or sexually assaulted a young female child. At one point, British police were researching the backgrounds of 530 known sex offenders, including 59 regarded as high interest.

There had also been a fourfold increase in the number of robberies in the area. Only weeks before the McCanns’ arrival, there had been two unsolved burglaries in the Ocean Club holiday apartment block. A childminder at the creche has reportedly claimed that the resort was considered so unsafe that nannies were given rape alarms and told not to go outside alone.

Prof David Barclay did not mince his words about the absence of this important context from the reporting frenzy back in 2007: “The Portuguese police and the Portuguese tourist board would have been quite keen not to feature the number of burglaries that were going on in Praia da Luz and other towns on the Algarve.

“And the fact there were random paedophiles going around taking children out of holiday apartments would have probably been quite a disincentive to families turning up for their holidays. So they wouldn’t want to feature that.

“I think that’s possibly an explanation why the Met, recently, were able to find more examples of indecent assaults on children than we’d been told about previously.”

“I truly hope that those reporting on the ‘story’ over the next couple of weeks will have a conscience.”

They referred to the 10-year anniversary as “a horrible marker of time, stolen time”.

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/it-s-likely-to-be-painful-madeleine-mccann-s-10th-anniversary-1.3064959

I guess this gossip magazine can loosely be included under the global media umbrella..



Gerry McCann shares heartbreaking description of night Madeleine went missing

He's opened up in his first in-depth interview

September 29, 2018 - 17:49 BST Hollie Richardson

Madeleine McCann's father Gerry has opened up about life at home with his daughter before she went missing, in a candid and heartbreaking interview about grief and loss. He described his relationship with Maddie as "incredibly special" on Radio 4, and said: "I formed a very strong bond with her from a young age," before adding: "One of the TV shows we watched together was Dr Who, which people might think, 'You can't have a three-year-old watching Dr Who,' but she loved it [ ]I would often do the bedtime story with Madeleine too, she had stars above her bed and that was our time." He also fondly remembered: "I'd take her to the local swimming pool and she would march around the pool and go up to her instructor with her cap and goggles on, smiling - no anxiety about it, she just went in there!"

Talking about the devastating night Maddie went missing during a family holiday to the Algarve in 2007, Gerry fought back the tears as he recalled: "It was disbelief, then panic and terror [ ]. I could only think of one scenario at that time. I remember just being in the bedroom [with wife Kate], distraught - the two of us just completely distraught. The pain, feeling helpless and alone together. It was the most painful realisation and we couldn't get the darkest thoughts out of our minds."



Highlighting the importance of seeking help for mental health during loss or grief, Gerry shared his own experiences of a counsellor, saying: "We went back to the apartment and the counsellor arrived, Alan, and at the time I just didn't think I was the kind of person who would need counselling or respond to it. But he was great and he said, 'I'm here, you can call me any time.' We were getting more and more distraught, until one of us said, 'Lets phone Alan,' and he came round to the apartment and he started talking to us, just asking about our normal life at home. After listening to us, Alan said, 'You sound like model parents,' [ ]  and I suppose at the time, that's something we probably really needed to hear. [ ]"

Gerry continued to explain that the help of family, friends and the community are what gave the couple strength, adding: "Getting through the nights was the hardest [ ], the thing that kept us afloat was the twins - having two other children - trying to make sure they had enough love and the attention they deserved was incredibly important." Explaining what life is like eleven years since Maddie's disappearance, he revealed: "Madeleine's room is pretty much as it was, there's a wardrobe full of presents from birthdays and Christmases. I think
the stars are even still up there."

https://www.hellomagazine.com/news/2018092962902/gerry-mccann-maddie-interview/

"I think" says he - those two words change what was intended to be a heart wrenching account of the mental torture experienced at the loss of a child, into a fabricated mawkish public appeal.

No wonder it was a radio broadcast and not televised - how would Professor McCann cope with showing the emotion he pretends to feel    ?

Surely he should know if the stars are still up there.
When they put all the presents from birthdays and Christmas into the wardrobe he would look around the room however briefly, how big is this wardrobe to hold 11 years of presents, are we talking Narnia size?
It would fit in with the fantasy story being spread around.
I wonder what her room looks like today if it is still even her room.
Could one of the twins now be in it?
Could it be storage?
Could it be locked and only kate sticks her head in occasionally to load up the wardrobe with more presents?
Could it even be a private shrine with only kate and gerry having access?

The latter would fit, if locked then there is a key and who knows where that key is kept?
If there is a locked room i can guarantee the twins would be interested, what is behind the locked door?
Have they looked and are keeping silent?
The twins know a damn sight more than they are letting on, when will they decide to start talking i wonder?

Hobs wrote:Have they looked and are keeping silent?
The twins know a damn sight more than they are letting on, when will they decide to start talking i wonder?

A very good point indeed!  

Two schools of thought in my view, bearing in mind I don't believe a word  the parents say (I'm not a statement analyst   ) as regards the twins then now or in the future.  Either the twins have been brainwashed from an early age which could quite easily influence their progress through the years or .... they are wise enough to know they've been hoodwinked and will be looking for answers as they get older.  

I'll go with the latter.  Whichever one things for sure - they will never lead normal lives, they will be messed up forever.  That in itself is reason enough for resentment.

Hobs wrote:Surely he should know if the stars are still up there.
When they put all the presents from birthdays and Christmas into the wardrobe he would look around the room however briefly, how big is this wardrobe to hold 11 years of presents, are we talking Narnia size?
It would fit in with the fantasy story being spread around.
I wonder what her room looks like today if it is still even her room.
Could one of the twins now be in it?
Could it be storage?
Could it be locked and only kate sticks her head in occasionally to load up the wardrobe with more presents?
Could it even be a private shrine with only kate and gerry having access?

The latter would fit, if locked then there is a key and who knows where that key is kept?
If there is a locked room i can guarantee the twins would be interested, what is behind the locked door?
Have they looked and are keeping silent?
The twins know a damn sight more than they are letting on, when will they decide to start talking i wonder?

 

Whatever happened to this bit of good news from 2012?

https://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t4325-tapas-7-to-be-interviewed-by-sy-review-team-sunday-express-is-something-happening-at-last

"Yard Call in Tapas 7"...for cheese and wine and a friendly chat.  Vomit inducing nonsense.