Len Port: The Madeleine Mystery

Chapter Twenty-four

THE MADELEINE MYSTERY

The peaceful seaside village of Praia da Luz was the unlikely setting for what turned out to be the most reported and discussed missing person case in human history. The disappearance has also been one of the most mystifying, controversial and bitter cases of its kind in modern times. For me as a reporter it all started so quietly.

On arrival in the village before 8.30am on Friday 4th May 2007, I expected to see some urgent activity. A young British girl, Madeleine McCann, had gone missing the previous night. At first I saw no movement at all. The village was silent and still. While driving around, I came across a single police vehicle parked on the roadside at a junction of minor roads towards the back of the village. I parked directly behind it. A few uniformed police officers were standing outside a block of holiday apartments. The only other people in sight were two women in conversation close to a corner ground floor apartment, 5A. As I approached, I noticed that one of them was clearly distressed, so much so I guessed she must be the missing girl's mother, Kate McCann. Later I learned that the other woman was a senior social worker on holiday from England. I overheard Mrs McCann tell her the police were "doing nothing" to find her daughter. She complained that they had not even questioned people staying in the same block of apartments. I understood the social worker to suggest that a description of the missing child should be circulated more widely. That prompted me to introduce myself as an Algarve-based reporter and say that I could use contacts to arrange alerts to be broadcast on an Algarve bilingual radio station. It had flashed through my mind that such alerts had been broadcast when Rachel Charles was reported missing in the Algarve 17 years earlier. The social worker then mentioned the British Consulate. I said I could help there too as I knew the staff at the Consulate and had just spoken to one of them on the phone. Perhaps my offer sounded disingenuous coming from a total stranger and a reporter to boot. Anyway, it was ignored.

As I moved around the village on foot there was at least one obvious manifestation of police activity. Police officers with search dogs on leads were vigorously combing the vicinity of the apartments, the area around the village church, on down towards the seashore and along the full length of the long curving beach. It was all being done in silence.

The tranquillity outside apartment 5A gradually changed. As the morning and afternoon wore on, the number of people arriving on the scene steadily increased. Curious passers-by mingled with reporters, photographers, TV cameramen and staff manning outside broadcast vans. A mixture of Portuguese, British and other nationalities, we all stood around asking each other questions and wondering what had happened to the little girl. All these years later, we are none the wiser. In the days, weeks, months and years following Madeleine's disappearance, the few known facts have been drowned in an ocean of public confusion created by a combination of conjecture, conspiracy theories, distortions, misinformation and lies.

Madeleine's parents have always been adamant she was abducted from the apartment. Others think she may have left the apartment of her own accord in search of her parents and was later abducted or met with harm in some other way. Some are convinced her body was secretly disposed of after she died inadvertently in the apartment. The trouble with all these theories is that while each can be shown to be a possible explanation, none is yet backed by solid evidence that elevates it to one of certainty. Upon publication of the latest edition of this book, police in both Portugal and Britain are re-investigating the case, giving fresh hope that the mystery may finally be solved and that Madeleine, if still alive, will be returned to her parents. A breakthrough could come at any moment. On the other hand it may always remain a mystery. Meanwhile, let us reflect in a little more detail on this complex saga so far.

For the McCann family from Rothley in Leicestershire the trauma began on the sixth day of a weeklong holiday. They were staying in a modest, ground-floor apartment in a tourist complex. During initial police questioning the day after the disappearance, Kate and Gerry McCann said they had settled Madeleine, aged three, and her younger twin siblings into their shared bedroom at 7.30pm. An hour later, with the children asleep and leaving the back patio door of apartment 5A closed but not locked, they joined seven holidaying friends for dinner. As on previous evenings, they dined in a poolside restaurant situated at the back of the apartment. It was a minute or two's walking distance, about 120 metres, away.

Like Kate and Gerry McCann, four of their seven friends were medical doctors and some had children of their own. In the course of a few parental checks, Gerry McCann said he went back to apartment 5A between 9.05pm and 9.10pm and saw all three of his children sound asleep. Kate McCann went to the apartment at 10pm. Madeleine was not there. Within half an hour of Kate McCann rushing back to the restaurant to raise the alarm, members of staff at the tourist complex where the McCanns and their friends were staying initiated a search of the neighbourhood. Holidaymakers and village residents joined in. The Guarda Nacional República (GNR) was alerted and soon had officers on the scene. Two police search dogs arrived. Police at first thought Madeleine may have wandered off, but Portugal's criminal investigation service, the Polícia Judiciáia, was informed after midnight. The neighbourhood search involved about 60 people on a calm and cloudless night with a full moon. It went on until about 4.30am.

Jane Tanner, a member of the group of friends, told police she saw a man with a child in his arms crossing the road in front of the McCanns' apartment at about 9.15pm, soon after Gerry McCann's check. For more than six years this sighting remained central to the McCanns' insistence that their daughter had been abducted. A family on holiday from Ireland also saw a man carrying a young child. This was much further away, closer to the centre of the village, at 10pm.

From the earliest days of the Portuguese investigation, the McCanns received a great deal of moral and financial support. The British Foreign Office showed remarkable interest. A wealthy Scottish businessman, Stephen Winyard, offered a £1 million reward for information leading to Madeleine's return. English tycoon Richard Branson was among those who donated to the Find Madeleine fund that quickly reached more than £2.5 million. Football star David Beckham, then playing for Real Madrid, held up a Madeleine poster in a televised appeal in Spain. In seeking publicity on a grand scale, the McCanns met with Pope Benedict XVI in Rome at the end of May and had a photograph of their missing daughter blessed by him. Gerry travelled to Washington courtesy of Branson's Virgin Atlantic airline and visited the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, the Justice Department, Capitol Hill and the White House.

By then, police had questioned and declared Robert Murat an arguido (suspect). Jane Tanner had claimed she was almost certain Murat was the man she saw carrying a child. Although insisting he had spent the evening with his mother in her house a short distance from apartment 5A, Murat became the subject of wild rumours and false newspaper speculation. International media coverage reached new heights four months later, in September, when Kate and Gerry McCann were also declared arguidos. Clarence Mitchell, who had earlier spent a month with the McCanns as a representative of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, relinquished his position as director of the media monitoring unit at the British government's Central Office of Information to become the McCanns' official spokesperson.

Among the obstacles confronting the Portuguese police was the ever-pressing presence of the media. Their constant demand for news was complicated by a Portuguese law that forbids the police from openly discussing or divulging any aspects of a criminal investigation. Article 86 of the penal code amounts to a gagging order on releasing anything that might prejudice a case. As the investigation wore on, this lack of information frustrated reporters faced with editors' demands for sensational stories. In the absence of official statements and verifiable advice, certain newspapers indulged in an orgy of innuendo, speculation, grossly inaccurate and even fictitious reporting. 'Leaks' from the Portuguese police to the Portuguese press were repeated and sometimes embellished in mass-circulating British tabloids. Some of the papers were eventually taken to task for defamation and obliged to pay large sums in damages.

The lead detective in the investigation, Gonçalo Amaral, looked into the likelihood of abduction but found no evidence to substantiate the McCanns' insistence that their daughter had been kidnapped. He came to suspect that Kate McCann had lied in claiming that an intruder had opened the front window and jemmied the shutter in the children's bedroom. He thought the parents might have invented the abduction story as a cover-up after Madeleine died inadvertently in the apartment, perhaps from an overdose of a sedative or a fall. This theory seemed to be supported by traces of blood and cadaver odours found by two specialist dogs brought out from the UK. The traces were found in the apartment and in the boot of a car hired by the McCanns.

Five months into the investigation, Gonçalo Amaral's involvement suddenly ended when he was dismissed from the case for imprudently alleging that police in Britain were biased towards the McCanns. Then, in July 2008 after 14 months of probing with no conclusive breakthrough, the Polícia Judiciária wrapped up their final report. Portugal's attorney general lifted the arguido status on all three suspects and formally archived the case.

In 2011 at the behest of the McCanns, Prime Minister David Cameron and Home Secretary Theresa May asked the Metropolitan Police Service to review the vast amount of documentation from the original Portuguese investigation, as well as the results of inquiries made by a succession of private investigators hired by the McCanns. After two years, the Met upgraded its review to a full-scale investigation. Five months later, in October 2013, the Portuguese authorities ordered a re-opening of their own investigation and went to work on new evidence they had uncovered. This occurred while a civil libel action was in progress in Lisbon in which the McCanns were suing Gonçalo Amaral over a book he had written, A Verdade de Mentira (The Truth of the Lie).

The McCanns had accepted £550,000 in 2008 from Express Newspapers in compensation for scores of defamatory articles in the Daily Express, Daily Star and their Sunday sister titles. Robert Murat was awarded £600,000 in libel damages from Express Newspapers, Associated Newspapers, the Mirror Group and News Group Newspapers. In compensation for Amaral’s book and a TV documentary based on it, the McCanns demanded €1.2 million.

The McCanns said the Portuguese police had been "very open" with them at the beginning of the original investigation. Three months down the line they still had "a very good working relationship." Things hit rock bottom in September 2007 on being declared official suspects. Faced not only with deep parental anguish over the loss of their daughter, Kate and Gerry McCann now had to cope with the humility of being publicly suspected of being the cause of her disappearance. Kate's mother Susan Healy was widely quoted as saying that the pressure on her daughter was so great, "I don't know how long she will hold on for... I don't know if any human can take such pressure." She added: "Kate is an only child. If it was me, I'd die. But she can't let herself get so low. She has to think of her family, of Gerry and the twins."

Amaral sank to a low ebb as well. With pent up frustrations over what he regarded as bias by the UK authorities and non-cooperation by the McCanns, he resigned from the police service and became the target of insults in the British press. His marriage broke down, he moved away from his daughter in Lisbon, grieved over the death of both his mother and father, and lost weight through illness. Soon after the 2013 start of the Scotland Yard investigation, the Jane Tanner sighting of a man carrying a child outside the McCanns' apartment became irrelevant when the man was publicly identified as an innocent father carrying his own child home from a crèche on the complex. The other sighting by an Irish family took on much greater significance with the simultaneous publication of two e-fit images produced by a team of ex-MI5 private investigators employed by the McCann's Find Madeleine fund after the Portuguese authorities had shelved their investigation five years earlier. Publication of the e-fit images along with televised appeals for information resulted in thousands of phone calls and emails. With international public interest in the case elevated to its 2007 heights, the Portuguese police re-opened their investigation to run both alongside and in conjunction with the British police.

[Courtesy of Nigel Moore at McCann files]

Len clearly WS the First reporter, and the First British Journalist at the scene.
But his story of dog patrols searching everywhere, an efficient operation going quietly about its duty doesn't fir with the official story.
He is on the News videos, with the camera round his neck, taking photos of the McCanns as they leave int he Police car, with Clarke standing uselessly in the road as they drive away

The McCann case divided opinions – By Len Port

Original Source: Portuguese American Journal 10 June 2014

Posted on 10 June 2014. By
Len Port, Contributor

In the midst of the latest phase in the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, Sky News presenter Kay Burley entered the fray with an article in the Daily Mirror in which she castigated “conspiracy theorists” and “haters” of Madeleine’s parents.

Burley, a reporter and newsreader of long standing, wrote: “I am absolutely staggered by the number of people on social media who think they know exactly what happened to little Madeleine. Conspiracy theorists believe that it’s only a matter of time before the McCanns are held culpable for their daughter’s disappearance.”

Burley went on to dismiss criticisms of Kate McCann’s refusal to answer questions put to her by Portuguese police, and to belittle what many have read into the findings of cadaver dogs in the McCanns holiday apartment and a hire car they used.

“Easy to dismiss such claims as Looney Tunes, but even a national newspaper was guilty of claiming the McCanns know more than they have told the police,” wrote Burley.

“As a mother I am offended and appalled by such unfounded allegations.

“Every morning the McCann’s must wake up only to be smothered by a blanket of guilt. ‘ If only we’d done this…’

“They have always held on to the hope that Madeleine will be found alive.

“So as the search continues, please ignore the haters and think instead of two desperate parents hundreds of miles away sitting by the phone and hoping against hope that nothing is found this time.”

This heartfelt standpoint exemplifies one of the most contentious features of this extraordinary case. In the absence of indisputable evidence, two conflicting schools of thought have developed about what happened to Madeleine: one that she was abducted, the other that she died inadvertently in the apartment and her parents were somehow involved in a cover-up.

There was no proof either way in 2007 and there is none today, but it is human nature to adopt a preferred line of probability depending on one’s logical and emotional approach.

It is true that many people hiding in the safety of anonymity or pseudonyms make abhorrent, highly abusive comments on internet sites. In the absence of legal options, indeed they should be ignored.

The trouble with Kay Burley’s condemnation, however, is that in its broad sweep it fails to recognize that many of those who do not accept as a given fact that Madeleine was abducted are not “haters.”

Some of the McCann doubters and critics have probably studied this case in more depth and for longer than most mainstream media journalists in Britain.

They are aware, for example, that back in May 2007 no trace was found of a break-in or a burglary, let alone a kidnapping, at the apartment from which Madeleine went missing.

Well-informed sceptics want the truth to emerge so that justice can finally be done. Their reasoned arguments and conclusions are worthy of serious consideration.

Not everyone believes what they hear on television news channels or read in newspapers. ‘Churnalistic’ and seemingly servile coverage of this case gives rise to distrust.

While there is genuine compassion for Madeleine’s devastated parents, a great many Portuguese mothers are offended and appalled by the repercussions in this country of leaving Madeleine and her siblings alone that fateful night.

The reputations of the Portuguese judicial police, the original lead detective and a range of innocent ‘suspects’ have been blackened in the British media over the years.

To cap it all, the Algarve has been cast recently as a hotbed of pedophilia and the ordinary folk dependent on tourism for their livelihood in Praia da Luz have been subjected to the crass timing of the current search operations.

Obviously this case has been a very public and impassioned one, but simplistic rants in the mainstream or social media are not helpful.

One indisputable fact is that no matter how much anyone sympathizes with or is critical of Kate and Gerry McCann, it is still far from clear exactly what happened to their daughter.

Sadly, it is looking increasing unlikely we shall know any time soon.

At the end of a TV interview at the weekend, former Chief Inspector Gonçalo Amaral, who believes Madeleine died in the apartment, was asked: “Will we ever find out what really happened that night?”

He replied: “Yes, we will. When MI5 opens the case files we will find out. Don’t forget that the British secret services followed the case right from the beginning. On location.”

Amaral did not predict how long it might be before that information becomes available.

[Courtesy of gerrymccannsblog.co.uk]

An extraordinary series of posts from Jon Clarke on 
https://www.facebook.com/groups/disgracedjournalistjonclarkeolivepress.debunked
has seen him defame and libel Len Port and Jill

Clarke still maintains he was the FIRST there, despite the photographic and video evidence and the documentary evidence from Len himself.

In answer to the comment
"yep it's as tiresome as your stories about being the first journalist in PdL, or having met the McCanns."
he replied
=AZWT5dgbgsURxs-eha03Oodib0256KIoqrCTiJzMkWMk4Q2dkQvqnltA_R7Ywn5GyC_HCCWMBA0PcigqbImAu6fuffngaXVOPIOKq6pIpAGutSZJ12E7Torww2C1Y-NkKjBYZeP1-bLASgTYNuAwf6aqc64r8obDQ7bzrOn3Xqx4UL2teLNXV6_B2BaA-FLLYFQ&__tn__=R]-R]
Jon Clarke
=AZWT5dgbgsURxs-eha03Oodib0256KIoqrCTiJzMkWMk4Q2dkQvqnltA_R7Ywn5GyC_HCCWMBA0PcigqbImAu6fuffngaXVOPIOKq6pIpAGutSZJ12E7Torww2C1Y-NkKjBYZeP1-bLASgTYNuAwf6aqc64r8obDQ7bzrOn3Xqx4UL2teLNXV6_B2BaA-FLLYFQ&__tn__=R]-R]
I WAS - firstly Len Port was not there first and secondly he’s not a journalist. He’s like you; a fantasist and a conspiracy theorist. 
The difference is, he can spell and is writing for a publication, albeit a dangerously biased and disgraceful one.

We have to wonder about the state of mind of someone who can write that.
Google is quite clear, as is Amazon
Len Port: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle https://www.amazon.com › Len-Port
Len Port has been a journalist for 50 years, working as a staff reporter, broadcaster and freelance correspondent for many leading news organisations.


and
About Len Port
Len Port has been a journalist for 50 years, working as a staff reporter, broadcaster and freelance correspondent for many leading news organisations. He covered events in the Far east in the Sixties, and in Northern Ireland and South Africa in the Seventies. Since moving to Portugal in the early Eighties, he has edited regional magazines, contributed to national dailies in Britain and written several books, two of which are currently available as ebooks with Amazon.




What does Clarke hope to gain by continually lying and defaming people at random in this way ?
This time he has also involved the paper for which Len writes, so perhaps they may take the matter further.

We know that Len Port was there early on the Friday morning, with photographic evidence of him wandering around the OC and with a previous examination of the shadows from the photos backing up his claim: 
 
‘On arrival in the village before 8.30am on Friday 4th May 2007……….’
 
JC continues to insist he was there before Len (the added bit about him not being a journalist is irrelevant to the claim)
 
JC: ‘I WAS - firstly Len Port was not there first……………’
 
Rather than banging heads against a brick wall trying to contest this, would we not be better placed to use this ongoing claim, which he is still refusing to withdraw, (can he actually evidence this?) to support the theory that he must therefore have been contacted at least some 5 hours earlier in order to get to the OC ‘first’ after what had to be a good four hour drive?
 
He has also claimed he was there by 1.30 in the morning, which would mean notification before 9.00 on the fateful night.
 
I know Verdi will poo-poo the suggestion, but such timing, whilst throwing the TM timeline completely out of the window, would also tie in with the Daily Telegraph ‘midnight’ posting being posted sometime before midnight for actual release on the 5th, which in spite of Tony’s F.O.I. request, the response to which clearly did not actually answer the question and the subsequent suggestion that the 12.01 posting was just an archiving fallback time, which from an examination of Telegraph archive posting times is again clearly not the case.
 
We do know from the photos that JC was there before the Mc’s went off to Portimao, which we think to be about 10.30/11.00, but Len Port could actually confirm the time from his Getty photos if asked, but whatever the truth is, it is still at least a 4 hour journey for him, so he certainly got a very early call.

Coupled with the pre-dated 'wayback' article and the 'last photo' time & date, etc? 
 
Is it worth one last crack at Grange to get something else on their file to hold them accountable for, before they sail off into the sunset?  

Madeleine inquiry in the UK - questions still needing answers
Courtesy of Len Port




The “Last Photo”- was it really taken on 3d May?


Madeleine McCann has been making headline news internationally yet again as the London Metropolitan Police investigation into her disappearance is reportedly going to be shelved this autumn.
I wonder if the Met’s Operation Grange has been deeply flawed from the very start and could that have something to do with the British ‘establishment’, a network that is said to include top politicians, billionaire newspaper owners and some leading police officers? But now we’re getting into the realm of speculation. Let’s not go there. Let’s stick with some of the facts as we know them.
The UK charity Missing People says that 140,000 people go missing in Britain every year. That’s 383 a day. Two thirds of the cases examined by the charity are under 18 years-of-age. So why did the British Government, diplomats and certain other influential individuals immediately give unprecedented support to the parents of this particular missing child? That’s the first of many fundamental questions that need answering.
The review and investigation conducted by Operation Grange, a special unit set up within London’s police force more than a decade ago, was always destined to fail, according to a well-known, distinguished London detective who said he would not get involved in the case because the official remit of Operation Grange was to investigate the “abduction” in the Algarve as if it had taken place in the UK. Why such a limited remit when suspicions hovered over Madeleine’s parents and while there was very little credible evidence that Madeleine had been abducted?
Why was Operation Grange told to turn a blind eye to the possible criminal involvement of Madeleine’s parents or their holidaying friends, which is the normal starting point in missing children cases? If neither the parents nor friends were involved, which may indeed be so, a standard investigation including them would have cleared their names, which the Portuguese police probe has never done. 
Why did such a limited investigation, which followed the review launched in May 2011, carry on and on with British Home Office approval at a cost to British taxpayers that has reached 13 million pounds? That’s more than 15 million euros or more than 16 million dollars.
Why have the British news media – especially the ‘red-tops’, but also some of the ‘quality broadsheets’ – become so biased and sycophantic in their reporting by always referring to Madeleine’s “abduction” without  adding a word such as “alleged” or “suspected”, and without questioning other possibilities? Why has The Sun, owned by the American-based billionaire Rupert Murdoch, been so privy to the little information dribbling out about the Operation Grange investigation?  And why has the British press long been castigating the Portuguese police and implying that the peaceful resort of Praia da Luz was a den of iniquity, an insult that the local residents emphatically deny?
Has Operation Grange ever properly considered that Madeleine may have disappeared several days before her parents raised the alarm on 3^rd May, or did that exceed their remit? A private research project carefully examined local weather conditions during the week of the McCann’s holiday. The analysis concluded that the date and time of the so-called “Last Photo” on a camera used by Kate McCann must have been doctored. There had been plenty of time to make fake changes because the camera and photo were not presented to the Portuguese police for examination until 24th May, a couple of days after Gerry McCann returned from a short visit to the UK. Operation Grange was fully informed about all this, but to no avail. Why?  
Convicted paedophile Christian Bruckner and his lawyer have totally denied any involvement, yet German prosecutors claim they are 100 per cent certain that Madeleine is dead and that Bruckner killed her. But if they had such certainty, why have they not charged him? The German authorities did not share whatever evidence they had with Operation Grange who insist they do not know whether Madeleine is alive or dead.  “It seems extraordinary our officers are so much in the dark,” said a former senior Met officer. “It begs the question why we are still bothering to run an inquiry if the Germans are so dominant.”  
Among the other things Operation Grange has showed no interest in is the remarkable offer by Dr Mark Perlin, chief scientist and executive of an American company, Cybergenetics, which is reputed to have the world’s most advanced equipment and methods to examine and identify DNA samples. Asked by an Australian news outlet if he could help in the Madeleine case, Dr Perlin said he would gladly analyse forensic samples found by specialist dogs in the McCann’s holiday apartment and in a car they had hired 25 days after the repored disappearance. He said he could decipher 18 previously unsolvable DNA samples dating back to 2007.
A now defunct laboratory in the UK had been unable to come to any proper conclusions about them. Despite the lapse of time, Dr Perlin was optimistic that if the samples were sent to him, he and his team could accurately identify the DNA in less than a fortnight. He offered his services to Operation Grange free of charge, but he got no response. Dr Perlin extended the offer to Gerry McCann, but he did not respond either.  Again, one wonders, why?
Neither the British Home Office nor anyone else connected with Operation Grange have been open and transparent about the limited investigation, but questions about it will not go away because the operation is widely perceived -  rightly or wrongly -  as having been a sham, some sort of cover-up.
Surely the public, who have long been fascinated if not obsessed with the most discussed and reported missing person case in history, should be allowed straightforward answers to reasonable questions. The Portuguese people offended by British news reports and Operation Grange visits to Praia da Luz, and the British taxpayers who have funded the investigation without any say in the matter, deserve honest explanations. Most of all, Madeleine deserves justice.
https://algarvenewswatch.blogspot.com/2022/03/madeleine-inquiry-in-uk-questions-still.html

Doug D wrote:
I know Verdi will poo-poo the suggestion, but such timing, whilst throwing the TM timeline completely out of the window, would also tie in with the Daily Telegraph ‘midnight’ posting being posted sometime before midnight for actual release on the 5th, which in spite of Tony’s F.O.I. request, the response to which clearly did not actually answer the question and the subsequent suggestion that the 12.01 posting was just an archiving fallback time, which from an examination of Telegraph archive posting times is again clearly not the case.

Clearly not the case?

So, you are prepared to ignore the many examples of The Telegraph's archive posting times that I've provided, in favour of an unproven unreasonable 12:01H time of going to press in the case of Madeleine McCann's disappearance?

I think 12:01H speaks for itself.

In short - why not 23:58 hours or 12:10 hours or 01:06 hours?

I will continue to provide examples of the 12:01H phenomenon.

Police identify Madeleine suspect

By Nick Britten 05 May 2007 • 12:01am

Last Updated: 12:34AM BST 07/05/2007 (Main body of article written 05/05/2007)


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1550667/Police-identify-Madeleine-suspect.html

Has it been established beyond reasonable doubt that Jon Clarke was contacted in the early hours of 4th May 2007 to hot-foot over to Portugal to cover the case from a journalistic point of view?

Forgive me if I'm wrong, or have forgotten something important, the original source of the news alert has never been established. Any media organ will want to be first on the scene for an exclusive - what/who was the origin of the news flash.

Team McCann claim to have made contact with the British press and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office during the night of 3rd/4th May 2007. I think it difficult, if not impossible, to establish the first point of contact but I can imagine he UK media being in a flurry to report the case of a missing British child holidaying with her family.

If it can be established, beyond reasonable doubt, that Jon Clarke - or anyone else for that matter, had been alerted at such a time to prove prior knowledge then there is a strong case to pursue the particular avenue. Until then the issue can only be filed as another possibility worth of note.

Personally, I don't think there is anything substantial here. Above all else I question why Jon Clarke of the Olive Press based in Spain would considered to be of particular use.

I think the bloke lives in a world of his own, a world that revolves around him and him alone. He's behaving more like a petulant child than a master criminal - I don't reckon he's got the fortitude to be anything but a deluded soul looking for the main chance.

From my experience, when some people set-up home outside their country of origin, they take on a whole new personality.

I knew a bloke (RIP) who claimed to be a leading entertainment agent, working with top names in the industry. It turned out he worked at Butlins in Scarborough as a red coat - or whatever their colour was. He did go so far as to flash around good quality headed note paper with a very impressive letterhead - anyone can do that!

Sorry, I digress.

What we have is Clarke saying in his book and in several places elsewhere that he was contacted by phone around 7 am(Spanish time = 6am Portuguese and English time)
The exact time is difficult to ascertain, partly because he has given different versions 0715 in the Olive Press 2017
0700 - 0730. Olive Press 2019 / Sandra Figueras / Netflix transcript
and "15 minutes before he left, which was before 0700 -  The Book

But then he alerted the WORLD on his FB page to the article in ABC, which fairly clearly he wrote or dictated himself, and Madueño filled in the details.
In that article as finally printed it says he got the phone call "that SAME DAY" (3/5/7)  and that he arrived in PdL ' in the early hours of the morning".  (4/5/7)    Much of the article is given as direct speech, in quote marks, as coming direct from Clarke.

But on Madueño's Muckrack page – which is still there for anyone who cares to look, even though journalists can edit or take down entries on their own pages, the quote is given as  – Arrival at 0130 –

Given the 4 hours drive from Ronda to PdL both of these 'versions" force the phone call to early to mid-evening on Thursday 3/5/7. given the time difference it may be as early as 8:pm.  2000 Hrs on 3/5/7

BEFORE the alleged event and a long time BEFORE the earliest reports.

What we are supposed to believe is unclear. 
Clarke has steadfastly refused to clarify which of these various versions is correct, and to explain why the others are wrong but remain out there in the public domain.

Yes, I quite understand the contradictions in Clarke's narrative but that alone doesn't prove anything but the fact that he is delusional and self obsessed.

He said one thing here, he said another thing there, he said another thing everywhere but what to believe - if anything.

If it can be established beyond reasonable doubt that Clarke was indeed contacted in advance and did indeed travel and arrive before the accepted time frame, raising questions about the veracity of the news alerting to Madeleine McCann's disappearance, then and only then do we have a case to answer.

Considering Clarke's propensity for fantasy and self aggrandizement, I doubt the truth as regards his movements nor motives can ever be realistically established.

Maybe if he's given enough rope he might eventually hang himself but that will never happen without strength of evidence. Really it's his word against nothing and lacking that original source, the first media alert and by whom, I doubt we will ever know.

Not to say we shouldn't continue ....

Exactly. 
From everything Clarke has written it is IMPOSSIBLE to know what, if anything, is the truth.
what we have is video newsreel, which fils in some gaps in our knowledge, but which he then DENIES
which makes life more exciting as we try to work out why he would do that.
[Deep trench, standing with 5 other journalists, NOT speaking to the Mccanns as they left, from Apt 5H
looking intently at the dog van and the dogs, and the forensic girl looking for prints on the NOT broken shutters
and so on.
He simply denies it all]

Do we know how and at what time Len Port heard about Madeleine Missing, was he working as an independent reporter or was he working for the media?

If it's already been covered, can someone point  me to where.

The peaceful seaside village of Praia da Luz was the unlikely setting for what turned out to be the most reported and discussed missing person case in human history. The disappearance has also been one of the most mystifying, controversial and bitter cases of its kind in modern times. For me as a reporter it all started so quietly.

On arrival in the village before 8.30am on Friday 4th May 2007, I expected to see some urgent activity. A young British girl, Madeleine McCann, had gone missing the previous night. At first I saw no movement at all. The village was silent and still. While driving around, I came across a single police vehicle parked on the roadside at a junction of minor roads towards the back of the village. I parked directly behind it. A few uniformed police officers were standing outside a block of holiday apartments. The only other people in sight were two women in conversation close to a corner ground floor apartment, 5A. As I approached, I noticed that one of them was clearly distressed, so much so I guessed she must be the missing girl's mother, Kate McCann.

Later I learned that the other woman was a senior social worker on holiday from England. I overheard Mrs McCann tell her the police were "doing nothing" to find her daughter. She complained that they had not even questioned people staying in the same block of apartments. I understood the social worker to suggest that a description of the missing child should be circulated more widely. That prompted me to introduce myself as an Algarve-based reporter and say that I could use contacts to arrange alerts to be broadcast on an Algarve bilingual radio station. It had flashed through my mind that such alerts had been broadcast when Rachel Charles was reported missing in the Algarve 17 years earlier.

The social worker then mentioned the British Consulate. I said I could help there too as I knew the staff at the Consulate and had just spoken to one of them on the phone. Perhaps my offer sounded disingenuous coming from a total stranger and a reporter to boot. Anyway, it was ignored.

As I moved around the village on foot there was at least one obvious manifestation of police activity. Police officers with search dogs on leads were vigorously combing the vicinity of the apartments, the area around the village church, on down towards the seashore and along the full length of the long curving beach. It was all being done in silence.

The tranquillity outside apartment 5A gradually changed. As the morning and afternoon wore on, the number of people arriving on the scene steadily increased. Curious passers-by mingled with reporters, photographers, TV cameramen and staff manning outside broadcast vans. A mixture of Portuguese, British and other nationalities, we all stood around asking each other questions and wondering what had happened to the little girl. All these years later, we are none the wiser. In the days, weeks, months and years following Madeleine's disappearance, the few known facts have been drowned in an ocean of public confusion created by a combination of conjecture, conspiracy theories, distortions, misinformation and lies.

Madeleine's parents have always been adamant she was abducted from the apartment. Others think she may have left the apartment of her own accord in search of her parents and was later abducted or met with harm in some other way. Some are convinced her body was secretly disposed of after she died inadvertently in the apartment. The trouble with all these theories is that while each can be shown to be a possible explanation, none is yet backed by solid evidence that elevates it to one of certainty. Upon publication of the latest edition of this book, police in both Portugal and Britain are re-investigating the case, giving fresh hope that the mystery may finally be solved and that Madeleine, if still alive, will be returned to her parents. A breakthrough could come at any moment. On the other hand it may always remain a mystery. Meanwhile, let us reflect in a little more detail on this complex saga so far.

For the McCann family from Rothley in Leicestershire the trauma began on the sixth day of a weeklong holiday. They were staying in a modest, ground-floor apartment in a tourist complex. During initial police questioning the day after the disappearance, Kate and Gerry McCann said they had settled Madeleine, aged three, and her younger twin siblings into their shared bedroom at 7.30pm. An hour later, with the children asleep and leaving the back patio door of apartment 5A closed but not locked, they joined seven holidaying friends for dinner. As on previous evenings, they dined in a poolside restaurant situated at the back of the apartment. It was a minute or two's walking distance, about 120 metres, away.

Like Kate and Gerry McCann, four of their seven friends were medical doctors and some had children of their own. In the course of a few parental checks, Gerry McCann said he went back to apartment 5A between 9.05pm and 9.10pm and saw all three of his children sound asleep. Kate McCann went to the apartment at 10pm. Madeleine was not there. Within half an hour of Kate McCann rushing back to the restaurant to raise the alarm, members of staff at the tourist complex where the McCanns and their friends were staying initiated a search of the neighbourhood. Holidaymakers and village residents joined in. The Guarda Nacional República (GNR) was alerted and soon had officers on the scene. Two police search dogs arrived. Police at first thought Madeleine may have wandered off, but Portugal's criminal investigation service, the Polícia Judiciáia, was informed after midnight. The neighbourhood search involved about 60 people on a calm and cloudless night with a full moon. It went on until about 4.30am.

Jane Tanner, a member of the group of friends, told police she saw a man with a child in his arms crossing the road in front of the McCanns' apartment at about 9.15pm, soon after Gerry McCann's check. For more than six years this sighting remained central to the McCanns' insistence that their daughter had been abducted. A family on holiday from Ireland also saw a man carrying a young child. This was much further away, closer to the centre of the village, at 10pm.

From the earliest days of the Portuguese investigation, the McCanns received a great deal of moral and financial support. The British Foreign Office showed remarkable interest. A wealthy Scottish businessman, Stephen Winyard, offered a £1 million reward for information leading to Madeleine's return. English tycoon Richard Branson was among those who donated to the Find Madeleine fund that quickly reached more than £2.5 million. Football star David Beckham, then playing for Real Madrid, held up a Madeleine poster in a televised appeal in Spain. In seeking publicity on a grand scale, the McCanns met with Pope Benedict XVI in Rome at the end of May and had a photograph of their missing daughter blessed by him. Gerry travelled to Washington courtesy of Branson's Virgin Atlantic airline and visited the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, the Justice Department, Capitol Hill and the White House.

By then, police had questioned and declared Robert Murat an arguido (suspect). Jane Tanner had claimed she was almost certain Murat was the man she saw carrying a child. Although insisting he had spent the evening with his mother in her house a short distance from apartment 5A, Murat became the subject of wild rumours and false newspaper speculation. International media coverage reached new heights four months later, in September, when Kate and Gerry McCann were also declared arguidos. Clarence Mitchell, who had earlier spent a month with the McCanns as a representative of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, relinquished his position as director of the media monitoring unit at the British government's Central Office of Information to become the McCanns' official spokesperson.

Among the obstacles confronting the Portuguese police was the ever-pressing presence of the media. Their constant demand for news was complicated by a Portuguese law that forbids the police from openly discussing or divulging any aspects of a criminal investigation. Article 86 of the penal code amounts to a gagging order on releasing anything that might prejudice a case. As the investigation wore on, this lack of information frustrated reporters faced with editors' demands for sensational stories. In the absence of official statements and verifiable advice, certain newspapers indulged in an orgy of innuendo, speculation, grossly inaccurate and even fictitious reporting. 'Leaks' from the Portuguese police to the Portuguese press were repeated and sometimes embellished in mass-circulating British tabloids. Some of the papers were eventually taken to task for defamation and obliged to pay large sums in damages.

The lead detective in the investigation, Gonçalo Amaral, looked into the likelihood of abduction but found no evidence to substantiate the McCanns' insistence that their daughter had been kidnapped. He came to suspect that Kate McCann had lied in claiming that an intruder had opened the front window and jemmied the shutter in the children's bedroom. He thought the parents might have invented the abduction story as a cover-up after Madeleine died inadvertently in the apartment, perhaps from an overdose of a sedative or a fall. This theory seemed to be supported by traces of blood and cadaver odours found by two specialist dogs brought out from the UK. The traces were found in the apartment and in the boot of a car hired by the McCanns.

Five months into the investigation, Gonçalo Amaral's involvement suddenly ended when he was dismissed from the case for imprudently alleging that police in Britain were biased towards the McCanns. Then, in July 2008 after 14 months of probing with no conclusive breakthrough, the Polícia Judiciária wrapped up their final report. Portugal's attorney general lifted the arguido status on all three suspects and formally archived the case.

In 2011 at the behest of the McCanns, Prime Minister David Cameron and Home Secretary Theresa May asked the Metropolitan Police Service to review the vast amount of documentation from the original Portuguese investigation, as well as the results of inquiries made by a succession of private investigators hired by the McCanns. After two years, the Met upgraded its review to a full-scale investigation. Five months later, in October 2013, the Portuguese authorities ordered a re-opening of their own investigation and went to work on new evidence they had uncovered. This occurred while a civil libel action was in progress in Lisbon in which the McCanns were suing Gonçalo Amaral over a book he had written, A Verdade de Mentira (The Truth of the Lie).

The McCanns had accepted £550,000 in 2008 from Express Newspapers in compensation for scores of defamatory articles in the Daily Express, Daily Star and their Sunday sister titles. Robert Murat was awarded £600,000 in libel damages from Express Newspapers, Associated Newspapers, the Mirror Group and News Group Newspapers. In compensation for Amaral’s book and a TV documentary based on it, the McCanns demanded €1.2 million.

The McCanns said the Portuguese police had been "very open" with them at the beginning of the original investigation. Three months down the line they still had "a very good working relationship." Things hit rock bottom in September 2007 on being declared official suspects. Faced not only with deep parental anguish over the loss of their daughter, Kate and Gerry McCann now had to cope with the humility of being publicly suspected of being the cause of her disappearance. Kate's mother Susan Healy was widely quoted as saying that the pressure on her daughter was so great, "I don't know how long she will hold on for... I don't know if any human can take such pressure." She added: "Kate is an only child. If it was me, I'd die. But she can't let herself get so low. She has to think of her family, of Gerry and the twins."

Amaral sank to a low ebb as well. With pent up frustrations over what he regarded as bias by the UK authorities and non-cooperation by the McCanns, he resigned from the police service and became the target of insults in the British press. His marriage broke down, he moved away from his daughter in Lisbon, grieved over the death of both his mother and father, and lost weight through illness. Soon after the 2013 start of the Scotland Yard investigation, the Jane Tanner sighting of a man carrying a child outside the McCanns' apartment became irrelevant when the man was publicly identified as an innocent father carrying his own child home from a crèche on the complex. The other sighting by an Irish family took on much greater significance with the simultaneous publication of two e-fit images produced by a team of ex-MI5 private investigators employed by the McCann's Find Madeleine fund after the Portuguese authorities had shelved their investigation five years earlier. Publication of the e-fit images along with televised appeals for information resulted in thousands of phone calls and emails. With international public interest in the case elevated to its 2007 heights, the Portuguese police re-opened their investigation to run both alongside and in conjunction with the British police.

Courtesy of Nigel Moore at McCann files

https://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t16023-len-port-journalist?highlight=len+port

Thank you Verdi.

You can be sure Clarke wasn't in Praia da Luz around 10am when Yvonne Martin was talking to the McCann's.

Len Port was, and Yvonne Martin confirmed it.

He would have written about it, claiming to be the first to speak to them.

Taken from an article I posted-up some while ago here on CMOMM, haven't a clue where it is at the moment so please excuse the repetition..

In Madeleine's shadow

By Caroline Lowbridge
3 May 2017

By the morning after Madeleine's disappearance, her parents were already frustrated by what they felt was a lack of police response.

Friends of the McCanns contacted the media to raise awareness and Luz was soon flooded with news crews from around the world.

Len Port, who has lived in Portugal since the 1980s, was among the first journalists to reach the apartment. He spoke to Kate McCann the morning after Madeleine was reported missing.

"The village was very quiet - no-one on the streets," recalls Mr Port, who was freelancing for a British newspaper at the time.

"I drove round until I saw a parked police vehicle, and I stopped and parked behind it. I realised I had got to the site from which Madeleine had gone missing.

"I saw two women standing there and one of them looked distressed. I could see that one was particularly distressed and I guessed this must be the mother of the missing child."

Mr Port said he never imagined people would still be talking about the case a decade later.

"It was inconceivable 10 years ago that this would become the most discussed, the most investigated missing person case in human history," he says.

Yet the search for a photogenic young child, who had disappeared in mysterious circumstances, quickly grabbed the attention of the media and the public.

British newspaper editors reported being able to sell up to 30,000 extra copies simply by putting a photo of Madeleine on the front page.

Public interest was such that a rewards package totalling £2.6m was raised by the News of the World, with benefactors including author J.K. Rowling and businessmen Sir Richard Branson and Sir Philip Green.

Sky News sent three presenters to Portugal, while ITV and the BBC sent out their star anchors Sir Trevor McDonald and Huw Edwards.

   I would say that the tabloid press in Britain have gone totally overboard with this"

Politicians also got in on the act. Cherie Blair, wife of Prime Minister Tony Blair, personally phoned Kate five days after the abduction to offer her advice, while the chancellor, Gordon Brown, had several phone conversations with Gerry.

Back in the McCanns' home village of Rothley, in Leicestershire, the war memorial became a makeshift shrine to Madeleine as thousands of people tied yellow ribbons to the railings, wrote messages of support and left behind cuddly toys.

Media interest in the story went up another notch when the Portuguese police declared Anglo-Portuguese man Robert Murat, and later the McCanns themselves, arguidos - or official suspects.

In 2008, the Portuguese attorney general, Fernando Jose Pinto Monteiro, announced there was no evidence to link any of the suspects to Madeleine's disappearance and their arguido status was lifted.

The McCanns later told the Leveson Inquiry into press standards how the media turned on them when they were declared official suspects.

They decided to return home to Rothley but found journalists camped outside their house.

Mike O’Sullivan, a television reporter for BBC East Midlands Today, had flown out to Luz in the days after Madeleine disappeared.

"There was a huge sense of shock there that a child could go missing in such a family-friendly resort," he recalls.

"The Portuguese police didn't provide many official updates, leading to a vacuum of information at times. Parts of the UK media would pick up on reports from unnamed sources in the Portuguese newspapers."

There was intense competition between media outlets for new angles on the story.

"It's hard to live with a mystery which seems so simple and involves a little child," says Mr Port.

"It's hard to live with not knowing. You want to come up with answers. And that has fuelled the press, particularly the British press, who have really gone to town on this story.

"The Portuguese press tend to be more modest, more levelled, less sensationalist than certainly the tabloids in Britain. I think the press coverage in Portugal has been fairly reasonable. No complaints at all really there.

"I would say that the tabloid press in Britain have gone totally overboard with this and there's been some really shoddy journalism and it continues now."

In Luz, local people express bewilderment at the continued media interest. Artur Rego, a local lawyer who was the Algarve's MP from 2009 until 2015, labels it "absurd".

"Thousands of children disappear every year and then they appear again in England and across Europe," he says.

"But for some reason, in that particular case, in 24 hours all the media was here, all the press, front page of newspapers, opening news on Sky, and suddenly this [place] was invaded.

  You've only got to read the newspapers and it says 'paedophile rings' and all this sort of thing"

Like many in Luz, he thinks the negative publicity hurt the local economy in the years following Madeleine's disappearance.

"It's back to normal [now] - nobody remembers about the case," he adds.

"They feel sorry for Madeleine of course, but honestly they only remember about the case when, once a year, the media decide to remember her disappearance."

British expat David Jones, who settled in Luz after helping create the TV character Fireman Sam, is sitting in the lounge of his home.

He considers himself "massively privileged" to live in the resort and believes people should not be deterred from coming here.

"There's been a lot of lies told and it's wrong," he says. "These are lovely people and they do not deserve the way that they've been treated.

"There are still teams coming out here filming, checking out people and coming up with all sorts of ludicrous ideas of what went on.

"I've known people to say 'I wanted to come down and see you and have a holiday there but I don't want to come because I've got kids,' or something like that. They're scared.

"There are still thousands that do but there are a lot of people that haven't come down here because of the bad name it has got, the reputation it's got.

"You've only got to read the newspapers and it says 'paedophile rings' and all this sort of thing.

"If you're a parent you're going to be wary of that."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/mccann_shadow

"The village was very quiet - no-one on the streets," recalls Mr Port, who was freelancing for a British newspaper at the time.

This again raises questions about Jon Clarke's version of the truth.

A journalist on location, readily available to cover the story for the British media - why the need to alert anyone living across the border in Spain.

I'll wager a flight from the UK would be faster than a Spain/Portugal road trip - in the middle of the night!

Madeleine McCann and the media

Original Source: Algarve News watch Tuesday 25 April 2017

Tuesday, April 25, 2017 Posted by Len Port at 6:05 PM

COMMENT

The most reported and discussed missing person case ever recorded is still not only a highly contentious mystery, but also a personal tragedy that has been turned into a public farce by elements of the media.

In the entirely predictable press frenzy surrounding the imminent 10th anniversary of the disappearance, much of the coverage, particularly in the British tabloids, has been absurd. But it should not be dismissed lightly.

Unable to come up with “news” on the case, the tabloids have been rehashing the same old speculation and guesswork.

“Could Madeleine McCann have been snatched by a lone paedo or simply wandered off?....”

“Abducted by slave traders and sold to a rich family, says ex-Met detective..”

“New hope after decade-long search....”

“Experts say Madeleine McCann’s body is almost impossible to find ”.

And then there was the much-touted Australian TV show that promised “a major breakthrough in the case”.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mirror took a slightly different tack with a story headlined, “What REALLY happened the night Madeleine McCann disappeared as nanny breaks her 10-year silence”.

The story did not explain what “really” happened, nor did it name the nanny or why she had remained silent for so long.

It quoted her as considering the McCanns to be “the picture perfect family” and repeated the usual British criticism of the Portuguese police.

More surprisingly, she claimed that the resort from which Madeleine vanished was considered so unsafe that nannies were given rape alarms (whistles) and advised, “don’t go anywhere by yourself, ever”.

There was nothing to suggest the Mirror had tried to question or check this or any of the nanny’s other assertions, but, in Praia da Luz, they were viewed with derision. It was seen as yet another attempt to brand Praia da Luz as a den of iniquity, which it is not and never has been.

The official police files on the case contain nothing about rape whistles or alarms. None of the signed statements by child-care workers mentioned anything about suspicious goings-on or Luz being “unsafe”.

The manager of the Ocean Club where the McCanns were staying said in a police statement in 2007 that he had “no knowledge of any untoward situation involving Ocean Club users or in the village itself, other than some damage and minor thefts”.

The Mirror story was also a reminder that real journalism has to a large extent been replaced by ‘churnalism’, which disregards traditional standards of original news gathering based on impartiality and fact-checking for accuracy and honesty.

The nanny’s story was quickly recycled virtually verbatim on the Internet by other tabloids. Even the broadsheet Daily Telegraph fell into line as did news services in the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

Trial by the media has had a huge influence on public perceptions about guilt or innocence in this case. Most of the mainstream media reports state as if it were a fact that Madeleine was “abducted”. Maybe she was. Maybe she wasn’t. There is no certainty either about the other main theory, that her parents covered up an accidental death in the apartment.

Until solid evidence is found and the culprits are brought to justice, the public fascination with this case will continue to fuel and be fuelled by the media’s determination to churn out stories whose accuracy and agenda may sometimes be open to doubt.

The current avalanche of stories inevitably evokes the previous admission by Lord Bell, founder and former chairman of the Bell Pottinger public relations group, to columnist and author Owen Jones, that “the McCanns paid me £50,000 in fees to keep them on the front page of every single newspaper for a year, which we did”.

Nevertheless, “Maddie” helps circulation figures and makes money. Money, along with misinformation, has always played far too big a part in this case which, let’s remember, is about the tragic loss of a child.