This article was written by Tony Bennett on 2 April 2011. It was revised and updated by MMRG on 2 April 2019. --------
Goncalo
Amaral, the detective who took the McCanns in for questioning, was
convicted of filing a false report by a Portuguese court, back in 2009.
He was given an 18-month suspended jail sentence. Recently that sentence
was confirmed on appeal. The Madeleine Foundation has steadfastly
maintained that these have been 'political' verdicts, resulting from
Goncalo Amaral's determination to charge the McCanns over the
disappearance of their daughter Madeleine.
Goncalo Amaral was
convicted largely on the testimony of Leonor Cipriano, a wicked woman so
evil she can justly be compared to Jezebel of the Old Testament or
Lucrezia Borgia of the Vatican. In an incestuous sexual relationship
with her own brother, h and she jointly murdered her 8-year-old daughter
Joana when she saw them together.
Cipriano later claimed she
had been abducted whilst on an errand to the local shop, sparking a
nationwide hunt for her. It was yet one more killing/accidental death
covered up b faking an abduction.
She and her brother were justly convicted of first degree murder and are
[were until recently - MMRG] serving jail sentences of 16 years and 16 years 8 months respectively, sentences that many would consider far too lenient.
[It is understood that Leonor Cipriano was released early last year i.e. 2018 - MMRG]. The
McCann Team publicity machine has regularly represented Leonor Cipriano
as a sweet innocent woman beaten into making a false confession by
Goncalo Amaral and his detectives. Others have assisted the McCanns in
portraying her as an innocent mother who was framed, among them
controversial self-professed 'criminologist', Mark Williams-Thomas.
At
this time, therefore (exactly a year after we first published the full
article), we are reproducing here Chapters 15 and 16 of The Madeleine
Foundation's} article on Madeira-based lawyer Marcos Aragao Correia, the
man who was suddenly and inexplicably brought in, in April 2008, to
represent Leonor Cipriano in her appeal against conviction and her
claims of torture against Amaral and his men.
For those reading
about Leonor Cipriano and Marcos Aragao Correia for the first time, we'd
refer you to our full article on Marcos Correia on our website:
www.madeleinefoundation.org.uk - click on 'Articles'.
[NOTE:
The Madeleine Foundation website is suspended until further notice. To
find out more about both Leonor Cipriano and Marcos Aragao Correia, put
their names into the CMOMM search bar - MMRG] The following brief points about Marcos Correia should be noted:
*
He originally claimed that he KNEW from UNDERWORLD CONTACTS that
Madeleine McCann had been abducted, raped, killed and her body thrown
into a lake
* He later admitted that he had LIED and now claimed he had had a vision of a big evil stranger strangling Madeleine
*
He later carried out two searches for Madeleine's body in the Arade
Dam, first claiming he had funded all this himself out of the goodness
of his heart, a kind of 'Good Samaritan', but later admitting that he
had been paid 'expenses' to do so by controversial Spanish detective
agency Metodo 3, WHOM THE MCCANNS WERE PAYING A QUARTER OF A MILLION
POUNDS TO AT THE TIME to 'look for Madeleine'
* The McCanns enthusiastically backed him as he prosecuted Goncalo Amaral for filing a false report.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Chapter 15 of the Madeleine Foundation's article about Marcos Aragao Correia.A summary of Leonor Cipriano’s 15 lies in CourtHere’s a convenient summary of at least 15 of the lies Leonor Cipriano told in court:
(1) She said that she had seen who had assaulted her, but later she denied this.
(2)
During the investigation into her allegation, she said that she had
been assaulted ‘more than once’, but now, during the trial, she stated
it that it happened only once.
(3) She said she knew the time of
the beating - around 8.00pm - but during the hearing described the room
she was supposedly beaten and did so without referring to any clock.
(4)
Despite having made a full confession in front of her lawyer and again
in her trial for murder in 2005, she told the Faro Court: “I don’t
remember having confessed”.
(5) Leonor Cipriano originally said
she had been beaten by PJ inspectors, but when asked to pick them out of
a line-up, she could not. She then changed her story to say that the PJ
inspectors ‘must have arranged for another person or persons unknown to
come into the police station and beat her’.
(6) She then
changed her mind once again to say she was beaten by the PJ – claiming
she cannot identify them because a bag was placed over her head during
the beating.
(7) Ms Cipriano had never previously alleged that
Gonçalo Amaral had personally laid a hand on her until the Court hearing
in Faro. Yet, in the Faro court, Leonor Cipriano changed her story once
again and now said that Gonçalo Amaral personally hit her during the
beating.
(8) The photographer who took pictures of Leonor
Cipriano’s injuries said he had taken the photographs immediately after
the injuries had occurred and that he was there ‘during the afternoon
and with daylight’. Yet Ms Cipriano had claimed that the photographs had
been taken ‘at night, in a room without light’.
(9) She said
that at one point during the beating she was forced to kneel on broken
glass. But there was no record of damage to her knees or legs that would
be consistent with such a serious incident.
(10) When originally
asked by the Prison Governor at Odemira Prison to explain her injuries,
Leonor Cipriano did not implicate anyone in the police.
(11)
When Ms Cipriano was asked in Court to give the names of the people she
was accusing, Leonor Cipriano had to pull a piece of paper out of her
purse.
(12) It was clear from the evidence that the beating of Leonor Cipriano took place during the 48 hours
after
she confessed to murdering her daughter. This is consistent with the
reliable reports circulating that Leonor Cipriano was assaulted by
fellow prisoners only
after they got to learn that she had confessing to her appalling crime.
(13)
She denied that she ever had a female lawyer. However, she did have a
female lawyer present when she made her original confession.
(14)
She said that there was a blue plastic bag over her head, but soon
afterwards she changed this to saying it was ‘green or blue’.
(15)
She denied that she was visited in prison by her lawyer, Mr Aragão
Correia, on 30 October 2008, during the trial. In this respect, she was
contradicted by Mr Aragão Correia himself.
Chapter 16 of the Madeleine Foundation's article about Marcos Aragao Correia.False evidence by the authorities to help frame Gonçalo AmaralThe weakness of the prosecution case was clear from early on in the trial of Gonçalo Amaral and his colleagues.
The
sequence of events leading up to the injuries sustained by Leonor
Cipriano were soon established. Leonor Cipriano had apparently made her
confession to the Polícia Judiciária at a police station on 13 October
2004. She had then been taken to prison. What was clear was that the
main injuries she suffered to her face and knees, quite probably caused
by a fellow inmate, or a group of them, were probably sustained a day or
two afterwards, certainly no earlier than 13 October, i.e.
after
she made her confession to the police. The date of the assault on Ms
Cipriano was between 14 October 2004 and the date she was seen by the
Consultant Prison Doctor, namely 18 October. The most probable dates of
any assault on her (by fellow inmates) are 14 and 15 October 2004.
The
Consultant Prison Doctor who was giving medical evidence to support the
alleged torture of Leonor Cipriano contradicted herself on one
important detail. A report written on the 18 October 2004 mentioned
no lesions to the knees
of Joana’s mother, who didn’t complain about any either. Yet on 29
October, she requested an X-ray to be performed on these lesions.
According
to the doctor, when she observed Leonor Cipriano on 18 October 2004,
she presented lesions on several parts of her body. She had ‘red swollen
eyes’, ‘the left eye shut’, and ‘minor cuts on both knees, superficial
but symmetrical’. She also presented lesions to her back, to her chest
and on her arms.
But on 18 October the doctor reported no ‘lesions’ on her knees.Evidence was then heard by the court that
the Prison Governor of Odemira Prison,
where Ms Cipriano was being held, had ordered the Chief Prison Officer
to materially alter a report about Leonor Cipriano’s health. Yet, said
Mr Carlos Anjos, speaking on behalf of Gonçalo Amaral -
it
was a ‘stupefying fact’ that [instead of the Prison Governor being on
trial] the person on trial for allegedly falsifying a document was
António Cardoso, one of the four detectives. There was a reference to Ms
Cipriano having suffered injuries before she arrived at the prison. A
former prison guard of Odemira Prison, Ana Paula Teixeira, was heard
during the trial on a video-conference link. She claimed that Leonor
Cipriano had
arrived at the prison with
injuries. Leonor Cipriano, she explained, had suffered her injuries
while she fell down some stairs at the police station where she was
interrogated.
Her evidence coincided with that of social worker
Adélia Palma. Ms Palma explained during a later court session during the
trial that Leonor Cipriano had told her that she had been assaulted
during the questioning she was subject to at the Polícia Judiciária and
that the detectives had ‘ordered’ her to say that she fell. But what is
the value of any evidence coming from the lips of Leonor Cipriano?
However,
whatever these injuries might have been, the clear evidence heard by
the court was that Leonor Cipriano suffered her main set of injuries
between 14 and 18 October
whilst she was already in prison. One
of Leonor Cipriaon’s many lies in court was her denial that she was
visited in prison by her lawyer, Mr Aragão Correia, on 30 October,
during the trial. Gonçalo Amaral’s lawyer, António Cabrita, had asked
for Leonor Cipriano to be heard again, as he wanted to clarify what he
referred to as ‘a lie’ about this visit - either by her, or by her
lawyer. Cabrita referred to an article that was published in a national
newspaper, where Mr Aragão Correia admitted to having visited Ms
Cipriano in prison on the night of the 30 October 2009, after she had
been giving evidence on Day One of the trial. He had told the press that
it was necessary to visit her to ‘calm her down’ as she had been ‘very
nervous’ following questions earlier that day from the Polícia
Judiciária’s lawyers.
Yet before that newspaper article appeared,
during the second day’s session, when António Cabrita had asked Leonor
Cipriano if she had received any visits at the prison, she replied that
she had not. “So someone is lying”, said Cabrita, merely stating the
obvious.
A further contradiction between Leonor Cipriano’s
evidence and that of others occurred when the photographer who took the
photographs of Ms Cipriano’s injuries in the prison reported that he was
called
immediately after the injuries were sustained and that he took the pictures
‘during the afternoon and with daylight’. But
Ms Cipriano had claimed that the photographs had been taken ‘at night, in a room without light’. There
was further consternation when another official admitted that the
prison had destroyed the photographs taken of Leonor Cipriano’s knees
because ‘the alleged injuries to her knees were not very visible’.Given
these examples of lies, contradictions, attempts to falsify documents
and cover up certain matters, it was scarcely surprising that some of
the four jurors asked a lot of questions of the witnesses during the
trial. One interesting statement made by Mr Aragão Correia to the court
was that
British Police officers had been ‘investigating’ Gonçalo Amaral. But
with Aragão Correia’s history of outright lies, fabrications and
changes of story, this might well have been yet another fabrication by
him. He did not of course give details of their names, ranks, collar
numbers or their places of employment. It would be a truly sensational
revelation if it could ever be proved that any part of the British
security services had actually been used to investigate Gonçalo Amaral
with a view to trying to get any ‘dirt’ on him.
It was speculated
in some quarters that it was just possible that the case against
Gonçalo Amaral and his fellow detectives had been brought by Portugal’s
equivalent of the Crown Prosecution Service in order to clear Amaral and
to prove him innocent. It was thought that the country’s chief
prosecutor had a good relationship with the Portuguese Police and
perhaps had allowed the case to be brought, perhaps anticipating that
Leonor Cipriano’s allegations would be exposed as bogus. But the
eventual outcome of the case - Gonçalo Amaral’s conviction for allegedly
‘filing a false report’ (which we shall come to in a moment) - suggests
more that
this was a political trial wholly intended by the relevant authorities to destroy Gonçalo Amaral’s reputation. The
British press’s response to the trial of Gonçalo Amaral was of no
little interest. The facts about Marcos Aragão Correia’s direct links
with
Método 3 - and thereby to the McCanns - were at least partially uncovered during the hearing, but
the British press were silent about it.
On the contrary, the alleged misconduct of Gonçalo Amaral was
mentioned, alongside endless pictures of Leonor Cipriano with black
eyes, clearly linking Mr Amaral to them as the alleged perpetrator or
author of the beating she had evidently suffered. So much so, in fact,
that many people I have spoken to in England seriously believe that it
was Amaral himself who was the one who personally beat up Ms Cipriano.
Such is the power of sustained disinformation circulated by the once-respected mass media of Britain. Let
us at this point summarise the most important information to have come
out of the trial of Amaral and his colleagues. We now know about, for
example:
(1) The involvement of
Método 3 in the case
against Mr Amaral, given their close association with Mr Aragão Correia
and their having been employed by the McCanns and Brian Kennedy
(2) The apparent funding of Aragão Correia by
Método 3 - though clearly we do not yet know the full extent of this
(3)
The claim that the Prison Governor ordered the alteration of an initial
report of the beating of Leonor Cipriano and of a medical report
(4) The alleged special treatment that Leonor Cipriano was accorded by the Prison Governor after the beating
(5) The fact that Leonor Cipriano appears to have been beaten some time
after
her confession, probably by fellow inmates who might have learned about
her confession and felt it their duty to punish her for it
(6)
The dirty and possibly illegal proposed deal to give the four detectives light sentences in order to ‘get’ Gonçalo Amaral.A
French journalist who has closely covered the Madeleine McCann case,
Duarte Levy, appeared on TV in October 2008 and claimed to have
interviewed an ex-convict who was serving a sentence in the same prison
as Leonor Cipriano at the time of the events. When asked if she knew who
had beaten Leonor Cipriano in prison, the female ex-convict is said to
have replied to Mr Levy:
“Of course I know. I was one of them”.
That account seems far more credible than what Leonor Cipriano asks us
to believe, namely that four police detectives, none of whose identities
she can recall, beat her up.
The trial of Mr Amaral suited the
agenda of the McCann Team and their chief public relations adviser,
Clarence Mitchell. Right from the early days of the hunt for Madeleine,
the McCanns and their advisers had criticised the Portuguese police,
first for mounting what they said was an ineffective search for
Madeleine, and later for wrongly and cruelly accusing them of having
been involved in Madeleine’s disappearance.
At every opportunity,
Clarence Mitchell, the man who had been at the head of the government’s
mission to influence the output of the mass media, attacked the
Portuguese police in general and Gonçalo Amaral in particular. He had
been Head of the ‘Media Monitoring Unit’ at the Central Office of
Information on the day Madeleine had been reported ‘missing’. He later
boasted that in that capacity he directed a 40-strong team whose job it
was ‘to control what comes out in the media’. It was perfect for the
McCann Team for Mr Amaral to be repeatedly referred to in the British
press as a ‘disgraced cop’with 'a criminal conviction'.
[NOTE: At
the time of concluding this essay, Mr Mitchell had been appointed to a
top role in the Conservative Party’s General Election campaign, as
right-hand man to Andy Coulson, the Head of the Conservative Party’s
public relations department and, of course, the former Editor of the
News of the World.
Mr Mitchell was clearly and prominently visible in the background of a
2-minute pre-election speech by party leader David Cameron released on
to YouTube on 4 April].
Every time bad news about the Portuguese
Police’s investigation surfaced, the McCanns and their public relations
team would be quick to seize on ‘corruption’, ‘beatings’ etc. that were
supposedly ‘rife’ in the Portuguese judicial system. It would surely
invalidate Mr Amaral’s conclusions in his book if the person who had
disgracefully smeared them by making them suspects was a man who could
be shown to have a track record of corruption and brutality. That would
in turn confirm that the McCanns and their ‘Tapas 9’ friends were
absolutely correct not to co-operate with Mr Amaral and his team.
It
would provide justification for the McCanns hot-footing it out of
Portugal - despite promising to stay there ‘until Madeleine was found’ –
as soon as they were made ‘arguidos’. It would also be a good excuse
for refusing to go back for a reconstruction of events on 3 May 2007, as
the Portuguese Police requested of the McCanns and their Tapas 9
friends in early 2008.
As one person on one of the many
Madeleine McCann forums pointed out: “Odd, isn't it? ‘McCann friends get
out-of-court payout from newspaper’ is front-page news in several
national papers, while ‘McCann private detectives accused of paying
lawyer to frame Maddie cop’ doesn't get a mention. Clearly I have no
nose for what makes a powerful front-page story”.
Finally, we might conclude this section with a translated report from the newspaper
24Horas published on 30 October 2008:
QUOTE
LEONOR’S LAWYER RECEIVED MONEY FROM THE MCCANNS 30 October 2008 - by Luís Maneta
Aragão Correia confirms that he was supported with money from Maddie’s parents:The lawyer claims he is defending Joana’s mother for free and that the McCanns paid him to ‘investigate’ Gonçalo Amaral“Was
Dr Gonçalo Amaral in charge?”; “Was Dr Gonçalo Amaral present?”; “Did
Dr Gonçalo Amaral hit you?”. Gonçalo Amaral, Gonçalo Amaral, Gonçalo
Amaral - this seems to be the obsession of Leonor Cipriano’s defence
lawyer during the trial in which Joana’s mother makes claims agaisnt
five Judiciária inspectors.
Three policemen stand accused of
torture: Pereira Cristóvão, Leonel Marques and Paulo Marques Bom. But
Leonor’s lawyer, Marcos Aragão Correia, has pointed his guns at Gonçalo
Amaral, who in this process stands accused of false testimony and
‘omission of denunciation’ [failing to file a report on an incident].
“This
doesn’t look like a trial in the Joana case but rather one in the
Maddie case”, says a source that is connected to the defence of the
former co-rdinator of the PJ in Portimão, who headed the investigations
into the disappearance of both children and became a sort of ‘public
enemy No. 1’ for the McCann couple.
“A possible condemnation of
Gonçalo Amaral in this process may make it easier for the English to
prosecute the Portuguese state”, the source says.
They have paid the expenses”When confronted by
24Horas with suspicions about his connection to the Maddie case, Marcos Aragão confirmed
that he was already paid by persons that are connected to the McCanns.
“They haven’t paid me honoraries but rather expenses due to
transportation, lodging and food, in order to interview João Cipriano
[Leonor Cipriano’s brother] in prison”, the lawyer explained, adding
that the purpose of the conversation with Mr Cipriano was ‘to analyse
the procedures of Amaral as a PJ investigator’.
“Following the
investigation - which originated from a report from the Association
Against Exclusion through Development (ACED), founded by Aragão Correia
himself (!) - Aragão Correia says that he accepted to represent Leonor
Cipriano without charging one cent. ‘I accepted this case for
humanitarian reasons only. I am not receiving any honoraries’, the
lawyer asserted, claiming that the ‘attacks’ against Gonçalo Amaral are
linked to Leonor Cipriano’s strategy in this case: ‘It’s not an
obsession. I can’t insist on the other arguidos because she has not
identified them’.
“Yesterday’s session at the Court in Faro was
marked by a new contradiction from the plaintiff. On Monday, Leonor
Cipriano had guaranteed that Gonçalo Amaral did not watch the
questioning during which she allegedly suffered abuse in order to make
her confess to her daughter’s death. Yesterday, Joana’s mother corrected
her version: “Gonçalo Amaral beat me”. When questioned by the judge,
she said she had recovered her memory after watching a report on
television”.
UNQUOTE
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For discussion, please visit this thread: https://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t2280-lies-of-leonor-cipriano
