***NEW - Reply received from Mike Penning M.P., Home Office, 6 Jun 2016*** (was: Reasons why the public need a report on Operation Grange: The letter handed in to Prime Minister, David Cameron, on 29 April 2016 in support of the petition

Below is the letter handed in to 10 Downing Street in Friday in support of the petition calling for a report on Operation Grange.

It includes an Appendix, namely the chapter from the book ‘The Smokescreen’ by Julian Peribanez and Antonio Tamarit which exposed the lies behind the false claims made by Metodo 3 boss Francisco Marco about their so-called investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance.

The day before the petition was due to be handed in, I decided that the letter I had drafted needed an Addendum, to deal with the absurd claims made in most of the tabloid press last week that it was likely that three Portuguese burglars had, between them, abducted Madeleine, and that they could not be arrested because of non-co-operation by the Portuguese authorities.

It was during the petition’s life that I decided it must be presented personally at 10 Downing Street, together with a letter explaining why people had such concern about Operation Grange.

There were quite a few ‘nay-sayers’ who said the petition was ‘pointless’ and ‘a waste of time’. In that respect I an grateful for the comments of Joana Morais in another place this week who wrote: “It is surely better to do something than to do nothing”.

I thought of other people in history to whom people might have said: ‘Don’t bother’. Did some people say to Martin Luther: ‘Look, it’s pointless nailing  up those 95 theses, nothing will change’? Yet his brave action in doing so exposed the gross abuses being perpetrated by the Roman Catholic Church, and led to the Reformation.

Before Emile Zola wrote his famous ‘J’accuse’ letter, did some people say, ‘You’re wasting your time’? Yet his courageous action, although it brought    him a great deal of persecution and opposition, inexorably exposed how rampant French anti-Semitism had led the French establishment to frame an innocent the Jew, Alfred Dreyfus, as a spy.

If my letter contains any mistakes, I apologise, please be so good as to point  them out. I am sure that some people will suggest that I have left important things out of the letter. Again, I am sorry if I have omitted any such, but please remember that, unlike any other member of CMOMM, I am under severe legal restrictions about what I can say publicly on the case.

It is intended here as a public record of major question marks about this most bizarre and extraordinary police investigation:

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PART ONE


66 Chippingfield
HARLOW
Essex
CM17 0DJ
Tel: 01279 635789                                                      

e-mail: ajsbennett@btinternet.com                                                                                              

Friday 29 April 2016
Rt Hon David Cameron MP
Prime Minster
10 Downing Street
LONDON
SW1A  2AA

BY HAND

Dear Mr Cameron

re: Petition on the Prime Minister’s website to order the Home Secretary to publish a report on the Madeleine McCann Enquiry [Operation Grange]

First of all thank you for continuing the previous practice of allowing people to submit petitions via the Downing Street Petition site, and also for facilitating my being able to deliver the petition results in person to you today. 

The petition attracted 3,111 signatures. Its preamble states: “Enquiries by British (and Portuguese) police forces have cost around £15 million in 8 years. The public is now entitled to a full report on how that has been spent. The report should cover the role of the government, the security services & UK police forces”. 

I appreciate that only those petitions that attract 10,000 or more signatories are entitled to a government reply. I am also aware that the police do not normally issue reports on their investigations.  However, in view of (a) the totally unprecedented media coverage the Madeleine McCann case has had for the past nine years, (b) the degree of concern that has regularly been expressed in many quarters about the way this operation was initially set up, (c) the way it has since been conducted, (d) the length of time of the operation – 5 years, and (e) its cost, estimated at around  £14 million so far, I trust you will feel able, on this occasion, to respond to the concerns expressed by many thousands of people - and of course the 3,111 who have signed the petition. 

The highly unusual way the initial review was set up, the reasons for it, the very unusual remit, and the later setting-up of what amounted to an active police investigation on foreign soil are all factors that make this police investigation unprecedented.

Added to that, many of the public have repeatedly expressed why this particular missing child case has been singled out, why it has taken so long with no apparent prospect of success, and its £14 million cost. That cost, moreover, excludes the costs of: (1) the Portuguese Police operation, (2) the Leicestershire Police investigation, and (3) the controversial private investigations carried out by the McCanns, their benefactor, Cheshire-based businessman Brian Kennedy, and the Directors of the Find Madeleine Fund.

I now set out some of the main areas of concern on which, we suggest, the public is entitled to persuasive and honest answers:

A. The setting up of the initial Review, 12 May 2011

For two years, the McCanns had been unsuccessfully lobbying two successive Home Secretaries (Alan Johnson, and then Theresa May) to secure a Review. Then Kate McCann decided to publish a book on 11 May 2011, which the Sun newspaper began serialising three weeks beforehand. On 11 May, the Sun published a letter from the McCanns, direct to yourself, appealing for you to order a Review. The very next day you did order a Review. 

Subsequently it emerged from credible sources ‘close to No. 10’, and widely publicised on the BBC and other news networks,

that you had been badgered into setting up the Review by Rebekah Brooks, the Chief Executive Officer of News International, which owns the Sun. There were credible reports that she had threatened you with ‘a week of bad headlines about Theresa May’ if you did not accede to her request. 

These issues were publicly aired by Lord Leveson at the lengthy public enquiry  held into press regulation. Rebekah Brooks was asked a direct question by Lord Leveson as to whether she had ‘threatened’ the Prime Minister in order for the McCanns to secure the Review they had been seeking. She said ‘No’. Lord Leveson then asked her ‘What word would you use, then?’ She smiled, winked and said ‘Persuaded’. It is clear therefore that, whatever words were spoken to you by Rebekah Brooks, she persuaded you to completely reverse decisions made by successive Home Secretaries over the past two years who, in their political and professional judgment, did not agree that there was a persuasive case for a review.

Any report to the public should investigate what Rebekah Brooks did say to you that caused you to order this Review.

Further, it was announced on the very same day (12 May) that the Home Secretary had agreed to establish a Review and had appointed Sir Paul Stephenson, then head of the Metropolitan Police (Met), to set it up. It is unlikely that all of that was done during the 24 hours between the Sun publishing the McCanns’ letter and your announcement of a Review. Any public report should explain how and when your decision was arrived at and whether, in fact, the McCanns’ letter in the Sun was a pre-planned move to enable you to announce the Review the following day.

B. The appointment of Detective Superintendent (DCS) Hamish Campbell as the Senior Investigating Officer (SIO) and the person who would decide the remit of the Review

A decision was taken, presumably by the then Head of the Met, Sir Paul Stephenson, to appoint DCS Hamish Campbell as the SIO in the case. He decided the remit of any review or investigation, which has proved controversial.

As any internet search reveals, DCS Campbell is best known for his actions in the case of the prosecution of an innocent man, Barry George/Bulsara, for the cold-blooded murder of TV presenter, Jill Dando, a murder that remains  unsolved to this day. He was the Investigating Officer. On evidence which he helped to assemble, Barry George/Bulsara was wrongly convicted of Jill Dando’s murder and served eight years in jail for a crime he did not commit. At the subsequent Court of Appeal hearing which led to the release of George/Bulsara, the judges suggested that there were strong indications that a trace of firearms residue which matched the known murder weapon of Jill Dando may have been deliberately planted in George/Bulsara’s coat pocket.

Another question which should be fully explained in any public report about Operation Grange is why an officer with such a poor record of criminal investigation and judgment should have been entrusted with this sensitive, high profile and complex investigation.

C. The conduct of Operation Grange: the chief suspects

There is widespread bafflement as to the conduct of Operation Grange.

One crucial aspect is their identification of the chief suspect allegedly responsible for abducting Madeleine McCann.

Until a BBC Crimewatch McCann Special transmitted on 14 October 2013, the chief suspect had been a man carrying a child said to have been seen by the McCanns’ ‘Tapas 7’ friend, Jane Tanner, at exactly 9.15pm on Thursday 3 May, about 45 minutes before Madeleine was reported missing. As Gerry McCann had given evidence that he had checked on his child between 9.05pm and 9.10pm that evening, it was assumed that this abductor must have snatched Madeleine immediately after Gerry McCann left the apartment to return to the Tapas restaurant.

Surprisingly, however, the McCann Team did not release an artist’s sketch of the man that Jane Tanner said she had seen until nearly six months later. This unidentified man remained the chief suspect when Operation Grange began their work in May 2011 and he continued to be featured on the Met Police and the McCanns’ websites for a further two-and-a-half years. This was despite the clear findings of the Portuguese Police enquiry that no reliance could be placed on Jane Tanner’s evidence. 

DCI Redwood on the Crimewatch programme in October 2013 claimed to have ‘found’ this man, but gave a highly improbable account of how he came forward and what he had been doing that night. DCI Redwood, Operation Grange’s Investigating Officer, told the 6.7-million Crimewatch audience that the Met now thought this man had been taking his daughter home from a night crèche at the Ocean Club in Praia da Luz.                

There were several unlikely features of DCI Redwood’s account, namely: 

(a) The man had waited for well over six years before approaching the police to say he now thought he might, after all, have been the man seen by Jane Tanner that night


(b) He had been walking past the McCanns’ apartment at exactly the same time as the man Jane Tanner said she had seen a man


(c) He was said by DCI Redwood to have been wearing clothes that week ‘uncannily similar’ to those described by Jane Tanner


(d) He was also carrying a young girl


(e) He was also said to have been carrying her in exactly the same way as described by Jane Tanner.


(f) The viewing public were asked to believe that this man had only just come forward after six years and that, co-incidentally, he had no buggy with in which to carry the child, her mother was not with him, and he had no blanket or other covering to cover the child on a cold and windy night in Portugal – the temperature being only 13C at the time. In addition to all these improbable coincidences, if the man had indeed been walking in the same direction as the man seen by Jane Tanner, a map showed that he had clearly followed a mysteriously circuitous route from the night crèche to have been walking in that place in that direction.

The strange production of this man by DCI Redwood, six years and five months after Madeleine was reported missing, raised many questions and needs a full explanation.

If that was bizarre, then just as bizarre was the new chief suspect unveiled by DCI Redwood on the same programme, namely a man said to have been seen by several members of an Irish family at around 10.00pm on Thursday 3 May 2007, the very time that the McCanns were raising the alarm.

During the programme, DCI Redwood said that this man was ‘the centre of our focus’ – the new chief suspect. He also unveiled two quite different-looking e-fits and told the Crimewatch audience: ‘This is the man we are now looking for’.

It was obvious to those who have a working knowledge of the case that there were major problems about the reliability of both the alleged ‘sighting’ and the accompanying e-fits.

Here is a summary of the main issues about the alleged ‘sighting’ and the two different e-fits:

(a) No member of the Irish family contacted the police about their claimed sighting until 13 days later

(b) When they did so, it was the day after news came in that Robert Murat had been arrested. The father of the family had met Mr Murat on a number of previous occasions

(c) The family have given at least four contradictory reasons for why they delayed reporting their sighting

(d) The descriptions they gave of the person they said they saw matched in almost every respect the description given by the McCanns’ friend, Jane Tanner. Thus all three descriptions – Jane Tanner’s, the Irish family’s, and that of the ‘man from the crèche’ given out by DCI Redwood on the Crimewatch programme - are of an identical-looking man.

(e) As the Met Police have now claimed that this sighting was that of a man carrying his children home from the night crèche, whose description matched that of Jane Tanner, this then raises the question of whether the 10.00pm sighting by the Irish family was either (A) of the ‘man from the crèche’, still carrying his child home (unlikely in the extreme) or (B) of another man altogether – but who looked very much like him, and also carrying a young blonde girl in pyjamas with no covering on her to protect her from the cold

(f) When interviewed on 26 May 2007 in Portugal, all three members of the Irish family said that they would ‘never be able to recognise him if we saw him again’

(g) The e-fits that were shown on the BBC Crimewatch programme were produced by Henri Exton, the former Head of Covert Intelligence at MI5. He had been employed by the McCanns’ leading private investigator at the time. Kevin Halligen. Later, between 2009 and 2013, Halligen spent over four years in jail for committing a major, £1 million-plus fraud. No date has been given for when he drew up these e-fits, but from public statements made by the McCanns, it appear that he and Exton were employed for around four months between April and August 2008. It is reasonable to assume therefore that these e-fist were drawn up during those four months

(h) The claim that members of the Irish family were able to draw up not one, but two e-fits – of faces that looked quite different - 11 months or longer after their original sighting of him, seems unlikely in the extreme. All three Smiths who gave evidence in person to the Portuguese Police admitted that

(i) they had only managed to see the man for a few seconds at the very most

(j) it was dark at the timethe street lighting, in their own words, was ‘weak’, and

(k) they were unable to get a clear view of his face because his face was ‘turned down’ and allegedly partly hidden by the child he was carrying

(l) as can be seen, the two e-fits produced on Crimewatch by the Met Police look like quite different men. There is a big difference in the overall shape of the face, the size of the chin, length of the nose, hairstyle and so on. It is unusual, to say the very last, for any police force to produce two separate and quite different-looking images of a suspect that they really want to find.In addition to all the above reasons for questioning this claimed ‘sighting’, as a result of an article in the Sunday Times on 27 October 2013, we are now much better informed about the history of these e-fits. The Met Police said nothing about their history on BBC Crimewatch, despite knowing fine well what their history was.

But following the Sunday Times article, we now know:

(a) the e-fits were drawn up between April and August 2008

(b) they were shown to the McCanns by Henri Exton some time during this period 

(c) the McCanns are on record as stating that they showed these e-fits to both the Portuguese Police and the Leicestershire Police ‘by’ October 2009. They have not been willing to give the actual dates they were disclosed to each police force

(d)according to the McCanns, neither police force considered that it was worth informing the public about these e-fits

(e) soon after Operation Grange was set up in May 2011, the McCanns showed these e-fits to Operation Grange

(f) Operation Grange did not act to show these e-fits to the public until the BBC Crimewatch programme of 14 October 2013.

Thus it was a minimum of 5 years and 2 months, possibly up to 5 years and 6 months, before these e-fits were shown to the public. 

These very strange issues concerning the ‘sightings’ of three men all allegedly fitting the same description - and the precise circumstances of the history of the e-fits - cry out for the police to explain their conduct.

                                                                                                   
D. The conduct of Operation Grange: the BBC Crimewatch programme of 14 October 2013

I have already made reference to the Crimewatch programme. 

The BBC admitted that it spent over 6 months and £1 million on the preparations for the programme.  The Met Police must have spent a similar amount. It received huge promotion by the BBC and the mainstream press, such that audience figures suggest it was watched by 6.7 million people - a Crimewatch record.  

During the programme, a purported reconstruction of the events of 3 May was shown to viewers. However, it was not faithful to the reported events of that evening. A host of material facts about that day that were made public in August 2008 when the Portuguese Police released full details of their  investigation  on a DVD. But nay of them were omitted from the Met/BBC reconstruction. This is highly unusual because normally a Crimewatch programne will disclose all leading material facts. For example, contradictory accounts of events and changes of story by some of the main witnesses were not featured in the programme. Thus the viewers did not get a balanced picture of events that day. That has led to concerns expressed by many that the programme was much more about public perception than about seeking relevant information from viewers - the normal purpose of Crimewatch. 

That impression was underlined by the fact that the two e-fits were shown to a British audience but not to any audience in Portugal, where the actual alleged sighting happened. There must also be a major question mark about whether two different e-fits of a man allegedly seen six years and five months before the programme was transmitted were ever likely to bring in any new information. The Met Police’s response to a Freedom of Information question I submitted at the end of last year revealed that, two years further on, this ‘mystery man’ had still not been identified. And of course forensic enquiries conducted in the McCanns’ apartment revealed no forensic traces of any abductor.

E. The conduct of Operation Grange: reliance on the unreliable evidence provided by the McCanns’ own investigation team


    
CONTINUED/  https://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t12739-new-reply-received-from-mike-penning-m-p-home-office-6-jun-2016-was-reasons-why-the-public-need-a-report-on-operation-grange-the-letter-handed-in-to-prime-minister-david-cameron-on-29-april-2016-in-support-of-the-petition#337840