CRIMEWATCH Update on MadeleineMcCann case tonight 19th March

Watching The Detectives wrote:With regard to elimination.....this is what I inferred from what was said:

They have DNA from the crime scene of one of the assaults mentioned i.e. nothing to do with samples taken from apartment 5A.

If someone thinks they know who the culprit is, then it could be ascertained whether or not they are in fact the guilty party by doing a comparison of their DNA with DNA they have from one of the assault crime scenes.

Tangled Web wrote:

notlongnow wrote:

TheTruthWillOut wrote:Quick question: Didn't Redwood intimate that any suspect could be eliminated, presumably via DNA? Therefore, if the culprit is the man from Cape Verde who has had dealings with the Portuguese justice system, wouldn't they be able to very quickly check if it was him?

yes,that's how it sounded to me.

I thought they didn't manage to retrieve any DNA as the apartment was forensically cleaned???

canada12 wrote:I have a question regarding the semen / saliva stain which was taken from the bedcover of the window-side bed in Madeleine's room in 5A.

Would you expect bedcovers of that sort to be laundered after each family has finished their stay in the apartment?

The bedcovers seem very lightweight and easily washed, and I might venture a guess that they would be laundered along with the sheets and pillowcases in advance of each new set of guests?

Has anyone ever checked this?

If so, if all the bedcovers were laundered in between guest visits, what is DNA doing there from a previous guest? Are we sure it's from a previous guest and not a current visitor? The DNA test result reports are written with quite a lot of ambiguity when it comes to this particular stain, which does seem to have morphed from semen into saliva.

Newintown wrote:

Tangled Web wrote:

notlongnow wrote:

TheTruthWillOut wrote:Quick question: Didn't Redwood intimate that any suspect could be eliminated, presumably via DNA? Therefore, if the culprit is the man from Cape Verde who has had dealings with the Portuguese justice system, wouldn't they be able to very quickly check if it was him?

yes,that's how it sounded to me.

I thought they didn't manage to retrieve any DNA as the apartment was forensically cleaned???

SY were referring to the break ins of the villas in other areas around PDL where nobody saw, heard or identified the culprit, but he strolled out without the parents of the said upset molested children doing anything about it i.e, kicking him in the goolies, giving him a good seeing to, tearing his hair out, tearing his sweatshirt off with the big "0" sign on it, no, none of that, they let him stroll out of their villas and sent him on his way without looking at his face, hoping he would find his own villa soon with his wife waiting with a rolling pin no knock him unconscious for staying out all night.   

Newintown wrote:

Tangled Web wrote:

notlongnow wrote:

TheTruthWillOut wrote:Quick question: Didn't Redwood intimate that any suspect could be eliminated, presumably via DNA? Therefore, if the culprit is the man from Cape Verde who has had dealings with the Portuguese justice system, wouldn't they be able to very quickly check if it was him?

yes,that's how it sounded to me.

I thought they didn't manage to retrieve any DNA as the apartment was forensically cleaned???

SY were referring to the break ins of the villas in other areas around PDL where nobody saw, heard or identified the culprit, but he strolled out without the parents of the said upset molested children doing anything about it i.e, kicking him in the goolies, giving him a good seeing to, tearing his hair out, tearing his sweatshirt off with the big "0" sign on it, no, none of that, they let him stroll out of their villas and sent him on his way without looking at his face, hoping he would find his own villa soon with his wife waiting with a rolling pin no knock him unconscious for staying out all night.   

russiandoll wrote:quote TonyB    " If Kafka were alive today, he would have a great plot line and lots of material right up his street for his next novel. "

I read some Kafka for my degree. Did you know this, Tony , about his novel Amerika  ?

The original manuscript bears no title – Amerika is the name given to it by Kafka’s friend and posthumous editor, Max Brod. He chose the title because Kafka often called the work his “American novel,” but Kafka had a number of different names for it, such as Der Verschollene (translated alternately as The Man Who Disappeared, The Missing One, Lost Without a Trace, or The Lost One)

russiandoll wrote:I know that he is persona non grata here and we are not allowed to post his stuff any longer, but I would urge a look at Blacksmith's latest.

Tony Bennett wrote:I have looked again at the 3 min 55 sec clip from the CrimeWatch programme - Matthew Amroliwola talking to camera and then entering the 'Operations Room' of Operation Grange.

Two things struck me:

1. The volume of paperwork, and
2. The distance of this 'operation hub' from the scene of the crime: about 2,000 miles.

A massive operation costing millions and employing some 38 detectives and goodness knows how many support staff, sited 2,000 miles away from the scene of the alleged abduction seems, on the face of it, crazy. And especially so when the crime certainly occurred in a foreign country, Portugal, it is far more likely than not to have been a Portuguese resident who committed any abduction, and it would be Portuguese police and the courts who would have to prosecute the casee, not Scotland Yard.

It is Kafka-esque on so many levels.

As for the paperwaork, as Redwood and D.I. Tim Dobson step into the incident room, there is a wall full of box files to thoir immediate left.

On each shelf, there were between 9 and 12 box files.

In each unit, there were 5 shelves.

There were 3 units next to each other:

So, 3 units x 5 shelves = 15 shelves x say 10 box files per shelf = 150 box files, with say up to 500 sheets of paper in each box file = 75,000 sheets of paper.

For all I know there may be shelves, units or even whole rooms full more of documents.

And there were still more boxes on a mass of tables.

Boxes labelled:

'OP GRANGE - FOR READING - ADMIN/MEDIA/ MISC. DOCS'

and

'OPERATION GRANGE - OM - FOR APPROVAL'

and

'OPERATION GRANGE - INDEXING'.

It looks like the indexing of all the documents is itself a major sub-operation requiring several staff to administer it. 

There were hundreds of such boxes on view - all overflowing with paperwork.

I guess that's not too surprising when you have made 287 separate requests, sent 33 ILORS, with more to come, you're working on '[size=16.363636016845703]multiple priority lines of inquiry', you've taken over 500 statements and raised 5,569 actions (I make that more than 5 every day, including weekends and bank holidays), you've been working on 60 'persons of interest', you have tens of thousands of mobile 'phone records to examine, and you're trawling through the records and personal histories of 530 sex offenders.[/size]

The entire operation has a false, hollow, surreal aspect to it, the record volumes of paperwork, the plethora of unlikely suspects, the e-fits that come and go like butterfiles on the wing, the endless presentation of meaningless and improbable statistics, the pretence that there s co-operation between the two forces when all the indications suggest the very opposite, and now the Prime Minister of Britian weighing in with palpably false claims that there is 'some progress' after 7 years, when there is clearly nothing tangible, and then offering basically to sort out those unco-operative Portuguese Police next time he attends an E.U. summit and sits next to the Portugese Prime Minister at dinner - presumably by saying something like: 'Look, old chap, do tell your Chief of Police to get a move on, will you?'

If Kafka were alive today, he would have a great plot line and lots of material right up his street for his next novel.

russiandoll wrote:Tony, re my Blacksmith post, projection refers to what ? Forum members have for a long time now not copied his stuff over, but there have been regular pointers to his writings. Is this now not allowed?

ProfessorPPlum wrote:At risk of incurring wrath, I think Blacksmith's latest is superb. I don't care that he is critical of this forum (he has every right to that view), his ability to capture the madness of the whole Madeleine McCann circus is IMO unrivalled.

russiandoll wrote:Watching, I agree. Suggesting to go and read is the same as a link, so it appears from what you say that I should not have made the suggestion. I was not aware links as well as posts of BS were no longer allowed.

  Why I have asked for clarification. There is more than one topic on the forum related to BS, the pages I looked at recently contained comments on the writings which were not deleted, hence my confusion.

 fwiw, I agree with the Prof Plum's post. I will not mention BS again if I am so advised, people are aware of him and those who value his work will go to the blog automatically.

Tony Bennett wrote:

russiandoll wrote:quote TonyB    " If Kafka were alive today, he would have a great plot line and lots of material right up his street for his next novel. "

I read some Kafka for my degree. Did you know this, Tony , about his novel Amerika  ?

The original manuscript bears no title – Amerika is the name given to it by Kafka’s friend and posthumous editor, Max Brod. He chose the title because Kafka often called the work his “American novel,” but Kafka had a number of different names for it, such as Der Verschollene (translated alternately as The Man Who Disappeared, The Missing One, Lost Without a Trace, or The Lost One)

Thank you. I have read 'The Castle' and 'Metamorphosis' (horrible).

The European Union bureaucracy has frequently been described as 'Kafkaesque'.

I found these snippets about Kafka in his Wikipedia entry; I can relate to quite a lot of it...

++++++++++++++

Kafka's writing has inspired the term ‘Kafkaesque’, used to describe concepts and situations reminiscent of his work, particularly ‘Der Process’ and ‘Die Verwandlung’.

Examples include instances in which bureaucracies overpower people, often in a surreal, nightmarish milieu which evokes feelings of senselessness, disorientation, and helplessness. Characters in a Kafkaesque setting often lack a clear course of action to escape the situation.

The term Kafkaesque has transcended the literary realm to apply to real-life occurrences and situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical. He writes about the futility of his characters' struggles. The writer Milan Kundera suggests that Kafka's surrealist humour may have been an inversion of Dostoyevsky, who presented characters who were punished for a crime. In Kafka's work a character will be punished although a crime has not been committed.

In Kafka’s works, the legal system is often oppressive. The law in Kafka's works is usually interpreted to represent a collection of anonymous, incomprehensible forces. These are hidden from the individual but control the lives of the people, who are innocent victims of systems beyond their control. Kafka's descriptions of the legal proceedings in Der Process portrayed them as metaphysical, absurd, bewildering and nightmarish…

Mirage wrote:

ProfessorPPlum wrote:At risk of incurring wrath, I think Blacksmith's latest is superb. I don't care that he is critical of this forum (he has every right to that view), his ability to capture the madness of the whole Madeleine McCann circus is IMO unrivalled.

I have to agree. I took a guilty look earlier.