Maddie Case: Vanishing Revisited

Maddie Case: Vanishing Revisited

16 March 2012 | Posted by Joana Morais Leave a Comment


http://joana-morais.blogspot.pt/2012/03/maddie-case-vanishing-revisited.html


Scotland Yard is making a “reappreciation” of the Maddie Process. The virtual reconstruction made by Portuguese scientists was disregarded. The English want to make another...

by Hernâni Carvalho

No one has reopened the process because there aren't new data regarding the child's whereabouts. Underway there is a re-evaluation of the process led by Scotland Yard, that has the cooperation of a unit from the Regional Section for Criminal Investigation and Prevention of the PJ of Oporto. It was recently divulged that 37 English police officers have been, for the past year, reading translations and reassessing Maddie's process, which was archived by the Portuguese Public Ministry in July 2008, 14 months after the girl's disappearance.

The English police, just in 2011, have already spent 2,2 million euros in investigations and re-evaluations. During that time period, they have been in Portugal on four different occasions and have established a partnership with the Judiciary Police. The latter, in its turn created a special team “with a more distanced look”, wrote Jornal de Notícias, quoting Pedro do Carmo, deputy director of the PJ. That is, another team that had nothing to do with the first investigations.

New PJ Team

The new PJ team assigned to cooperate with the English, is coordinated by Helena Monteiro, who has had a similar role in Carina case, the young woman who disappeared in Lamego and was later found at the bottom of a ravine in that same region. This is not the first time that Maddie Case changed hands. Months before its archival, the process was pulled from the PJ in Algarve and given to a team in Lisbon, at the time lead by Paulo Rebelo without bringing something new into the world or to the process.

Four years since the archival and five since the disappearance of the English girl, after the PJ of Portimão/Faro and Lisbon, now it's Oporto's PJ turn to do the re-evaluation. At a forthcoming reassessment, probably another PJ team from another region will have it's turn.

More Virtual Reconstructions

A reconstruction is one of the tools of criminal investigation more used by the police, world wide, in the path towards the discovery of the origin of a fact and of the truth. It is written in manuals. A presential re-enactment of what took place in the night that Maddie disappeared (May, 3 2007) was never done.
The McCanns and the friends who accompanied them at the dinner never had the temporal availability to participate. The Public Ministry ended up forgoing that step.

The only known virtual reconstruction was made by the professors Paulo Sargento (Criminal psychology) and by Pedro Gamito (IT department) of the Lusófona University, using as basis the statements of the McCanns and their friends. By means of a specific software the statements given to the PJ were evaluated and cross-checked. Thus, one can now understand better the possibilities of each one of them being at a certain place and time, as stated by them.

This work by the Portuguese scientists was ignored, but now the Scotland Yard divulged that they will also use a software program to reconstruct those events. In English, that might be more enlightening.

Facts

On the night of May 3, 2007, the McCann couple left their three children alone in the apartment (the twins of two years old, and Maddie with four years old)and they went out to have dinner with their friends at a restaurant of the tourist resort where they were staying. A few hours later after the disappearance of one of the couple's children (Madeleine), several media and press advisers were deployed to Aldeia da Luz, Algarve, announcing to the world the abduction of the girl.

What took place inside the apartment from where she disappeared was never established. It's a fact that no hairs nor traces pertaining to someone else outside the circle of family and friends was ever found. It's a fact that no one knows what has happened to Madeleine.

Interruption of the Investigation

Since the launch of his book Maddie - The Truth of the Lie, the former PJ coordinator, Gonçalo Amaral has said: “There was no failure of the investigation, there was an interruption of the investigation”. The man who led the first investigation into Madeleine's disappearance, was removed from the case five months later, he acknowledged some errors in the investigation (the lack of reconstruction, the absence of tests to the twins and also to the couple and Madeleine's clothes). Failure or interruption, in fact, what did take place was the archival.

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in TVmais, Police Cases, page 112 & page 113, paper edition