This article was originally
published by Tony Bennett on The Madeleine Foundation website on 4 March
2010. It was written just two weeks after the McCanns had succeeded in
the Lisbon High Court in finding Goncalo Amaral guilty of libeling the
McCanns. The court ordered him to pay damages.
Goncalo
Amaral appealed against this draconian verdict and succeeded on appeal
at the Portuguese Court of Appeal in October 2009. The McCanns in turn
appealed against that decision, triggering an astounding series of
appeals and counter-appeals which lasted a further eight years. Finally,
in April 2017, the Portuguese Supreme Court found AGAINST the McCanns
and ordered them to pay Goncalo Amaral his court costs of around
£450,000.
The article has been revised and
updated by MMRG on 13 May 2019 and the Madeleine Foundation has given
permission for it to be republished, with amendments.
How many more false sightings will there be of Madeleine McCann?
Article filed 4 March 2010
Where
we have used translations from the Portuguese in this article, we
acknowledge with gratitude the voluntary help of a group of Portuguese
translators who have laboured to help us in Britain to understand the
many documents released by the Portuguese police.
No-one in The Madeleine Foundation is paid anything.
=========
This
week has seen the opening up a new phase in what Mr Clarence Mitchell,
the Chief Public Relations Officer for the McCanns, described on 19
February this year as the ‘complete mystery’ of the disappearance of
Madeleine McCann.
The new phase could accurately be described as:
‘A new series of sightings prompted by Ricardo Paiva’s admission that
the Portuguese police did not follow up all the sightings of Madeleine
notified to them since 2007’.
This week’s press have been full of
stories about possible ‘sightings’ that were not followed up. One was
in New Zealand. Another was of a ‘girl in a black wig’ seen in Portugal.
We’ll look at these in more detail in a moment.
There’s no doubt
that the press, ever keen to run ‘Madeleine’ stories because of the
continuing public interest in what really happened to her, nearly three
years after the event (and to make money), have seized on these new
‘sighting’ stories emerging from the McCann Team and their chief
spokesman.
A. The background
The
sightings stem in essence from a short passage in the evidence given in
an interim hearing in the libel trial in Lisbon of The McCanns v.
Goncalo Amaral. Mr Amaral is the former co-ordinating and senior
investigating officer on the case who wrote the book
A Verdada da Mentira
- ‘The Truth About A Lie’ - in which he suggested that the evidence
pointed to Madeleine having died in her parents’ holiday apartment. The
McCanns in July 2009 served a libel writ in the Lisbon civil courts
claiming 1.2 million euros (over £1 million) damages from Mr Amaral and
his publishers,
Guerra e Paz. That sum was the amount of profit
estimated to have been made by Mr Amaral and his publishers during the
year it had been on sale. It has sold around 250,000 copies in Portugal.
The
McCanns claimed that by suggesting that Madeleine was dead, Mr Amaral
had seriously hindered the ongoing search for Madeleine and caused them
immense emotional distress.
In September, the McCanns obtained an
indefinite injunction banning the sale of Mr Amaral’s book and an
associated DVD and documentary produced by TVI (a Portuguese TV
channel). Mr Amaral appealed, and his appeal was heard between 12 and 14
January 2010. There was a further hearing on 11 February. On 18
February he learnt that his appeal had failed. The banning of his book
stays in place until the final libel trial, expected to be listed in
June or some time after.
During the hearing, one of Mr Amaral’s
seven witnesses was a former colleague in the Madeleine McCann
investigation, Ricardo Paiva. During his evidence,
he said that there had been many sightings that the Portuguese police had not followed up,
ever since the investigation was effectively archived in July 2008.
The McCanns seized on this, and demanded, through their lawyers,
inspection of the details of all these ‘sightings’.
The
result that is that the Portuguese police have indeed released their
dossier of recent ‘sightings’ to the McCanns and their lawyers, and also
to the media. The media has already been awash with stories of how the
‘incompetent’ Portuguese police had allegedly failed to follow up vital
leads.
But were they incompetent - and did they fail to follow vital leads?
B. The first police report
In
the interim police report by Tavares de Almeida, filed on 10 September
2007 when Goncalo Amaral was still heading up the investigation, he
wrote this:
“The child’s parents immediately attributed her
disappearance to the action of a third party, promoting the scenario
that she had been abducted. Abduction was only one of a number of
possible scenarios, but the family publicised their claim that Madeleine
had been abducted in a manner that had never been seen before. On the
very next day, English television stations led their broadcasts with the
news of Madeleine’s disappearance. The media presented the abduction as
the truth, although we were looking at other scenarios.
“As time
went by, the abduction scenario was not confirmed. The abduction
hypothesis did not stand up. For instance, no ransom was ever demanded
in exchange for information by the alleged kidnappers or for the child
herself.
“Nevertheless, and considering the evidence of one of
the McCanns’ friends, Jane Tanner, we continued examining the
possibility that Madeleine had been abducted. This went alongside the
gathering of all kinds of information, working on a number of other
possible scenarios”.
C. The final police report
It
was an unprecedented and worldwide media storm that the Portuguese
police had to cope with. Suspicions that the parents might not be
telling the truth ran alongside literally hundreds of ‘sightings’ of
Madeleine in four dozen or more countries. This involved staff from the
Portuguese police liaising with police officers in other countries and,
of course, INTERPOL, so that each credible sighting could be followed
up. To get a better idea of the sheer scale of the task the police
faced, here is a very short extract from the final report of the
Portuguese police, dated July 2008:
“We made investigations where
there was news that had credibility and could have signalled the
presence of the child in various locations worldwide, as well as the
hundreds of enquiries carried out to confirm or dismiss them. The
alleged abduction of Madeleine necessitated action by many bodies,
especially the Polícia Judiciária, but also other police forces. In
parallel, there was unprecedented coverage of the case in the media,
both national and foreign. This was especially true in the U.K., where
day after day their news at prime time included live transmissions from
Praia da Luz, with many special programmes dedicated to the case.
“Some
of the information had no credibility, whilst, at the other extreme,
other alleged sightings required a more thorough investigation, and
these are included in our Appendix. There remains a large number of
supposed sightings, some receiving notable emphasis, such as those in
Belgium and Morocco. These were vague or had discordant or incongruent
elements, which deserved attention with a view to revisiting them in the
future, should solid new information arise.
In subsequent
days, over 100 investigators were employed by the Portuguese Police and
they received an enormous collection of diverse notifications from
innumerable contacts about Madeleine’s disappearance. It
required us to install a permanent police post within the Luz village.
The result of such efforts is found in the documentation and the various
appendices”.
The Portuguese police in their report then go on to list some of their many enquiries. Here are some examples:
a)
From pages 199 onwards we have the testimony of the witness Jeremy
Wilkins…He said that he saw an individual with a strange appearance
behaving oddly. This was later confirmed to be a guest who helped with
the search…
b) From pages 127 onwards, we give details of the
sighting of a child, with a face similar to Madeleine’s, in a petrol
station. When the images from the petrol station were shown to the
parents, they said without hesitation that they were not of Madeleine.
c)
On page 134 we report on another sighting of a girl with a physical
resemblance to Madeleine. We later confirmed it was not Madeleine.
d)
In addition, an attempt was made to locate an individual known to have
sexually abused minors. Later we determined that he had left Portugal
and was not in the country at the relevant time period.
e) There
was an investigation into reports by Denise Beryl Ashton, page 136. She
reported the presence of two individuals, whom she could not identify or
recognise, who claimed they were collecting for a local children’s
home, which would have been fraudulent. Although this took place on 3
May, we could not relate this to the disappearance of Madeleine. Neither
did the description correspond to the sketch publicised widely in the
media by the McCanns’ Chief Public Relations Officer [Clarence
Mitchell].
f) On pages 40 to 144 we describe another alleged sighting of Madeleine. It was in fact another child.
g)
A witness, Derek Flack (for his interview see page 200), reported the
presence of a suspect, who was allegedly looking at the McCanns’
apartment, near a white truck or van, referred to at pages 145 and
following. It was not possible to identify this person, despite an
artist’s impression having been computer-generated. However, we believe
there are very strong possibilities that they were construction workers…
h)
In pages 161 to 197 we have reports from a Nuno Jesus. He told us that
his daughter, who had clear similarities with Madeleine, was allegedly
the victim of a kidnap attempt by a Polish couple. He provided the
registration number of their hired car to the police. The couple were
approached when on the point of returning to their native country.
Nothing was detected that could incriminate them, see pages 214 to 216.
The car and the place where they had enjoyed their holidays were
analysed in a laboratory. Again, nothing incriminating was found.
i)
At page 148 we describe door-to door visits to 443 houses in Praia da
Luz, indicating the gigantic nature of the investigation. These places
were entered and searched.
j) At pages 208 to 210 we report on a
Lance Purse, who gave us a sketch of an individual similar to a sketch
submitted by another witness, who didn't identify himself. At pages 211
& 212, we reported on another person brought to our attention for
the sexual abuse of minors. Further enquiries revealed nothing of
relevance to the investigation…
- - - - -
By now, we’ve
made the point that over 100 officers were employed investigating
Madeleine’s disappearance and from the above brief reports, we can see
just how thorough the Portuguese police were. The Portuguese insist that
all ‘credible sightings’ were followed up. They add:
“Within
the first 24 hours, we set up an extensive operation which included the
participation of several police forces and civil protection services;
in total,
over 130 separate organisations were involved in this operation.
After 48 hours, we had mobilised a total of over 300 police forces and public bodies…hundreds
of enquiries and investigations were carried out, such as the
identification of and interviewing…In addition we executed door-to-door
searches in the homes and tourist resorts of Praia da Luz and
surrounding areas…During the days immediately following Madeleine’s
disappearance, over 700 persons who might possess any relevant
information about the matter were formally or informally questioned…Over
2,000 separate enquiries were made by us. There was international
co-operation, especially with Spain, the Netherlands and the UK…
Any information with a major or even a minor level of credibility was explored by us,
both here and abroad. We gave special attention to dozens of supposed
sightings or places where Madeleine might be located, most of which, in
fact, were widely publicised in the press.
“We withheld no effort in this investigation, which was probably unlike any other ever carried out in Portugal”.
D. What Ricardo Paiva said in court on 11 February 2010
After
Ricardo Pavia gave his evidence in the Lisbon court on 13 January,
there was a further hearing in Amaral’s appeal against the banning of
his book, on 11 February. The McCanns’ Solicitor Isabel Duarte made
reference in her address to the court to Paiva’s evidence. Here’s how
Vanessa Allen in the
Daily Mail reported it:
QUOTE
Portuguese
police 'ignored hundreds of sightings' in search for Madeleine McCann:
Sightings of the missing girl were filed as 'not relevant'
Portuguese
police faced growing pressure to reopen the Madeleine McCann
investigation yesterday, amid claims they ignored potential sightings of
the missing girl. Detectives have refused to investigate hundreds of
clues about the disappearance, including photographs of children said to
bear a 'shocking' resemblance to the blonde youngster. They include a
cluster of sightings in Italy and Spain which could hold the key to
solving the mystery and ending the years of heartache suffered by her
parents, Kate and Gerry McCann. But instead they have gone unchecked,
marked as 'irrelevant' after the case was shelved, and left to gather
dust in a police archive.
The McCanns' private detectives [Note:
former Detective Inspector Dave Edgar and former Detective Sergeant
Arthur Cowley], who are continuing the search for the missing child, did
not even know the dossier existed until a Portuguese policeman let slip
a reference to it during a legal hearing. Inspector Ricardo Paiva said
police had received hundreds of tip-offs from witnesses convinced they
had seen Madeleine and knew where she was being held. They sent in
photographs of children and of locations which they believed were being
used by her abductor, believing that police would investigate their
claims. But arrogant detectives were so convinced by their own theory
that Madeleine died on the night she disappeared, and that her parents
faked her abduction, that they made no attempt to check the sightings.
The
McCanns' lawyer, Isabel Duarte, has seen the dossier. She said every
single statement had the same phrase scrawled across it: “This is not
relevant to the investigation”. She said: “I was shocked at how much was
in there, and that absolutely nothing had been done to follow any of it
up. Every piece of information was treated the same way - Ricardo Paiva
writes on it: ‘This is not relevant to the investigation’. He is the
witness who declared in court that he believed Madeleine is dead. You
cannot find a person when you are not looking for them”.
Mrs
Duarte said they had not investigated any tip-offs since the case was
officially shelved, in July 2008, when the McCanns were cleared as
official suspects in the investigation. She said information had
continued to pour in from potential witnesses, and even from other
police forces in Europe, but it was ignored, even when there were clues
including photographs of girls who looked like Madeleine.
The
lawyer said: “Some of them are very, very similar to Madeleine. But Kate
and Gerry had never been shown them. 'There was information from
Leicestershire Police, French police, Spanish police, and again nothing
was done about it. Kate and Gerry did not even know this file existed
until this week. I am going to give a copy of the file to them so that
their private investigation team can follow up the information in it.
“But
I am angry because it is the Portuguese investigative police who should
be doing this job. They have the power and the capability to do it. It
is they who should be doing it, not Kate and Gerry”. Their spokesman
Clarence Mitchell said they had been shocked to discover the full extent
of the Portuguese police's failure to investigate Madeleine's
disappearance. He said it had confirmed their worst fears about the
investigation, saying: “They were shocked when they went through the
file and saw what was in it, and even worse what little had been done to
follow any of it up. Kate and Gerry have consistently known that
potential fresh information was not being properly followed up, if at
all. The tragedy of this case, which once again has been highlighted by
this, is what little was done to find Madeleine. Kate and Gerry will
have to do it themselves as they have been doing. They are the only ones
looking for her”.
UNQUOTE
E. A new series of ‘sightings’ are publicised
And
so the McCanns, their lawyers and advisers had got hold of the file of
claimed sightings, and are beginning to publicise them.
The
first major one to be publicised was an alleged sighting in New
Zealand. Today (4 March), however, New Zealand police said they had
traced the girl in question and established that it was not Madeleine.
A
witness claimed to have seen Madeleine McCann in ‘The Warehouse’ in
Dunedin, New Zealand, more than two years ago. Retail assistant Taryn
Dryfhout and a security guard saw the girl, with blue eyes and blonde
hair, in December 2007. Madeleine had green eyes. Ms Dryfhout said: “I
was quite stricken by the wee girl who looked just like Madeleine
McCann. She was quite apprehensive to talk to me and sort of stammered
over her words when she was trying to think of her name”. The child
eventually said her name was ‘Hailey’. No doubt the child was a bit
disconcerted to be suddenly asked her name.
Ms Dryfhout said:
“The man and woman with the child were a little bit suspicious”. CCTV
footage in ‘The Warehouse’ showed a girl being led into a supermarket by
a ‘stout’ man in shorts, while another photo in the
Daily Mail showed
a young girl in The Warehouse accompanied by the man and an older boy.
In fact, the New Zealand police did investigate the alleged sighting at
the time - but not as thoroughly as in recent days.
The
publication of the girl’s image in New Zealand caused problems for her
parents, who objected to her being identified in this way. Inspector
Dave Campbell said: “We will not name the family nor give any further
details about them. We ask that media outlets remove the image
portraying the child and family from their coverage including websites
to protect the privacy of the family”. Campbell also confirmed that he’d
reported the alleged ‘sighting' to INTERPOL at the time - over two
years ago.
A private investigator in Dunedin, Wayne Idour, said
he couldn't work out why the video footage of the young girl had not
been aired publicly sooner, to identify her or the man and woman she was
with: “I can't work out why they haven't shown the actual moving video
footage of them walking through the store. I can't work out why that has
never been put to the public. That, to me, would have been the logical
thing to do. You can show it in a way that you are not accusing them of
anything, you are just appealing for information about their identity”.
The
McCanns have frequently complained of an invasion of privacy. But here
was the sudden invasion of the privacy of a New Zealand family.
There
was another New Zealand sighting. A couple from Balclutha, Michael
Griffiths and Mary Habib, said they believed they twice saw a girl
resembling Madeleine on the morning of 6 August last year in Dunedin,
and then in nearby Milton in the afternoon. The girl was with a man aged
between 35 and 40. They reported the sightings to Balclutha police
later that night, and to the official Madeleine McCann website, but
received no reply from either. Mr Griffiths said: "I am 80% confident it
was her”, while Ms Habib said: "I am 80 per cent-plus sure”.
More alleged New Zealand ‘sightings’ of Madeleine were reported in Alexandra and Queenstown, Otago, and have been followed up.
Another
previous ‘sighting’ of Madeleine was again reported this week - the
case of a girl in Portugal seen with gypsies, wearing a black wig, 18
months after Madeleine's disappearance. A British holidaymaker, Jean
Godwin, 56, of Widnes, said she was “100% sure it was Madeleine McCann.
Her eyes were wide open and my attention was drawn to her large irises.
She was about 3ft 1in and about five years of age. She was white with a
pale complexion. I couldn't sleep, I had my husband take me back to
look. This was a young girl, in the middle of the two women and holding
the hand of each. The child was wearing what was clearly a black wig. It
was short, cut in a bob style and very thick. The wig was shiny and
unnatural looking and out of keeping with her very pale complexion and
fair eyebrows. She was very thin and I would describe her as
malnourished. Her cheeks looked gaunt. I think she had a bump on her
nose”.
The child was seen with two gypsy women, referred to in
many media reports this week as ‘the fat gypsy women’, in a town just 30
miles from Praia da Luz where she disappeared. One of the women was
said to have been seen by another Brit tourist ‘acting suspiciously’
outside the McCanns' apartment on the day she vanished. Investigators
feared Madeleine could have been ‘held in a shack at an orange grove’.
Apparently the girl in question had never been traced. But in recent
days, the McCanns’ private detectives say they found one of the women - a
Portuguese cleaner [see below]. Jeni Weinberger, 38 (a guest, together
with her husband Paul, in Praia da Luz at the same time that the McCanns
were there), is said to have also identified the cleaner (Yvone Albino)
as the woman she saw in Praia da Luz the day Madeleine disappeared.
[Picture: Yvone Albino, a cleaner from Silves, said to have been seen outside the McCanns’ apartment on 3 May 2007]
Detectives
traced her to an isolated farmhouse on an orange grove in the town of
Silves, north of Protimao. In the following months, she was seen to pay
several visits to the property, a holiday home owned by a teacher, Mr
Martins, and his partner, Miss Silveira. The inquiry team deemed them to
be ‘suspicious’.
The investigators’ concerns were raised when
they discovered a white Citroen Berlingo belonging to the couple with a
child’s doll on the back seat (see below) and a child’s drawing among
rubbish bags - even though the couple did not have young children. Mr
Martins said that the doll was given him by students he had taught in
the past.
[Picture:A doll found in the car of a couple investigated in connection with the disappearance of Madeleine McCann]
The
McCann Team put out a comment that: “This is one of our strongest
leads”. Another newspaper reported that “Gerry and Kate McCann were
angered and shocked that the information wasn’t given to their private
detectives”.
Other leads in the newly-released Portuguese police
dossier include a report that ‘a small blonde girl had been dragged
along the road to Faro airport’ on the night she went missing and
another detailing how a young girl who appeared like the missing child
was seen being held at gunpoint on a French motorway by a half-naked man
in August 2008.
F. Problems with previous sightings
There
have been hundreds, probably thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of
alleged ‘sightings’ of Madeleine. I even had such a moment myself, in a
pub garden in Kent in the summer of 2008. A girl of around five,
blonde, and with a face not unlike Madeleine’s, was in the garden, being
looked after (and not very well) by two strange looking men of
different ages. A few minutes later the girl, running around and not
being properly supervised, went flying into a garden seat, cutting her
lip badly, bleeding profusely. When they became aware, the men rushed
inside to get assistance. Momentarily I thought: ‘Could that have been
Madeleine McCann?’
Last year, a friend of ours - who definitely
does not share my reservations about the McCanns claim that Madeleine
was abducted - became convinced she had seen Madeleine on a TV
programme. She’d contacted the TV programme, who had been dismissive and
said: ‘It’s not Madeleine’. But she was not put off and begged me to
pass on the number of the McCanns’ private investigation hotline.
“There’s just that chance it could be her. I’m sure it’s her”, she said.
And
there must be countless such stories. Madeleine has been ‘seen’ in
Chile, on a plane to Venezuela, in Sweden, in the Philippines, in the
United States.
There was the pale-looking fair-haired girl seen
on the back of a Moroccan peasant woman whose photograph was splashed
across British newspapers in September 2007. Even the staid h
Daily Telegraph ran
the picture of the woman with child on its front page with the heading:
“Could this be the face of Madeleine McCann?”. Many who saw the picture
thought it must be her. But of course it wasn’t, it was a relative of
the peasant woman. The family found the press attention most unwelcome.
Another
person who suffered a worrying moment was when a Croatian team
footballer suddenly found a woman trying to snatch his two-year-old son,
convinced it was Madeleine McCann. As the
Daily Mail reported,
when two British tourists spotted a woman leading a child with long
blonde hair on the Croatian holiday island of Krk, they immediately
thought it was Madeleine McCann. The couple became even more convinced
that the child was Madeleine, after secretly taking a couple of
photographs. One of the women grabbed the child’s arm, but only then
realised the child not only wasn't Madeleine, it wasn't even a little
girl. The boy's father was a well-known Croatian footballer, Dino Drpic,
who plays for Dinamo Zagreb, and his mother, Nives, was a renowned
glamour model. As the
Daily Mail put it: “The Posh and Becks of Croatia”. They were not at all happy.
Nives
said: “I started getting suspicious when the British woman approached
Leone and started chatting with him. Suddenly she grabbed him by the
arm, apparently thinking nobody was watching him. However, when I went
over she realised her mistake and apologised”.
In September 2008,
two holidaymakers were convinced that they saw Madeleine at Cala d'Or
on Majorca resort, reported the sighting to local police. A British
couple told police that they saw a young blonde girl matching
Madeleine's description in the company of two women, both aged 40-50,
who appeared to be northern European. Again the sighting was fully
investigated by Spanish police.
Last year a Devon man was
summoned to a local police station because someone had seen him and his
eight-year-old step-daughter in a petrol garage and thought the girl was
Madeleine. As it happened, she bore a very strong resemblance to the
new artist's sketch shown by the McCanns on the Oprah Winfrey show four
months previously. The person noted the registration number and notified
the police.
Fire protection officer Jon Hazlehurst was at home
when police officers arrived on their doorstep and asked them both to go
to a police station. He suffered some anxious moments, saying: “I was
surprised more than anything. My first thought was that it was someone
pulling a prank on me before I realised that they were quite serious.
I've never been called into a police station as a possible kidnapper.
The police were very polite and I understood that they had to follow up
the lead, even if it didn't come to anything”.
Millions of pounds
worth and tens of thousands of hours of police time must have been
spent the world over, following up these endless false leads, often
given by people utterly convinced that they had seen Madeleine.
G. The problems associated with looking for Madeleine
Let
us assume for the moment that Madeleine really was abducted by a
stranger between about 9.11pm and 9.14pm on Thursday 3 May 2007, as the
McCanns and their ‘Tapas 9’ friends claim.
How realistic is it
for people to carry on searching for Madeleine? The McCanns refer to the
recent astonishing case of Jaycee Lee Dugard, abducted at the age of 11
and not discovered until a full 18 years later, and then only by
accident. It gives them hope, they say. But being realistic, on the rare
occasions that children as young as Madeleine are abducted by
strangers, they are rarely found alive.
Then - in the unlikely
event that the abductor, if there is one, is keeping Madeleine alive,
for whatever purpose - how likely is it that s/he would be out on the
streets with Madeleine for all to see? S/he would know of course that
Madeleine has green eyes with a visible coloboma defect in her right
eye. That would be an additional reason for keeping her out of sight.
Even
if the abductor/abductress was prepared to take the risk of Madeleine
being seen in public, would s/he not disguise her in some way, for
example by dyeing her hair a different colour? And how difficult would
it be for the abductor/abductress to keep a child, now aged nearly
seven, away from public services, such as the school, and the health
centre?
What would Madeleine look like now anyway? It is not
easy to project what a three-year-old will look like three to four years
later. A photo-sketch has been produced which shows her to be a happy
and smiling child of about 9 to 11 years of age - the one specially
produced to coincide with the McCanns’ appearance on the popular Oprah
Winfrey Show, televised world-wide. Does that photo really narrow down
the search?
On top of all that, where are we supposed to look? We have no guidance whatsoever from the McCann Team.
And
who exactly are we looking for? Over the past three years, we have been
given no fewer than 14 different artists’ sketches of possible
abductors, twelve of them men, and two of them women, one of them said
to be a ‘Victoria Beckham look-alike with an Australian accent’. The
McCanns’ current lead investigator, former Detective Inspector Dave
Edgar, said at a press conference last September that Jane Tanner, the
McCanns’ friend who said she had seen a man carrying a child away from
the McCanns’ apartment,
‘might have seen a woman’, not a man.
Despite
upwards of £2 million and quite possibly double that spent by the
McCann Team on private detective agencies, the public has not been given
one single fact about who the abductor/abductress might be and where.
That is perhaps not surprising when the two main agencies used by the
McCanns, Metodo 3 and Oakley International, had extremely dubious track
records and were both led by con-men.
Metodo 3 was led by
Francisco Marco, who notoriously boasted just before Christmas 2007 that
his men were ‘closing in on the abductors’ and that ‘Madeleine will be
home by Christmas’. Kevin Halligen, the boss and owner of Oakley
International, who replaced Metodo 3, is a hard-drinking con-man
currently awaiting extradition to the U.S. on fraud charges...
[NOTE
by MMRG...Kevin Halligen was eventually extradited to the U.S. in 2012
after three years in Belmarsh top security prison in London. He was
convicted of frauds amounting to $1.5 million (about £1,150,000), and
spent a further year in prison after being jailed for four years. In
2017 he was found dead in a pool of blood in circumstances which suggest
he could have been murdered. At the time of updating this report, no
date for the Inquest on his death has yet been set - MMRG, 13.5.2019
]
Why did the McCann Team appoint such men to look for Madeleine?
The
contining search for Madeleine is, at least, a fulfilment of Dr Gerald
McCann’s prophecies in June 2007. On 3 June 2007, just one month after
Madeleine had ‘disappeared’, Dr Gerald McCann was already planning a
‘big event’ to mark Madeleine’s ‘abduction’. He told the press: “We want
a big event to raise awareness that she is still missing…It wouldn’t be
a one-year anniversary, it will be sooner than that.” Less than a month
later, on 28 June 2007, Dr McCann said: “I have no doubt we will be
able to sustain a high profile for Madeleine’s disappearance in the
long-term”.
Many wondered at the time how Dr McCann could make a
comment like that, when the world was being asked to look for Madeleine
and there was always the possibility that the police might, any day,
bring them news that Madeleine had been found alive. If there remained a
reasonable prospect of finding her, how could you have ‘no doubt’, as
Madeleine’s father did, that you could ‘sustain a high profile’ for her
disappearance ‘in the long-term’.
H. Do the McCanns and their spokesman think Madeleine is dead?
A
final issue for those of us who are being asked ‘not to hinder the
continuing search for Madeleine’, by querying the McCanns’ abduction
claim, is the remarks made recently by Dr Gerald McCann and their Chief
Public Relations Officer, Clarence Mitchell, referring to Madeleine
being dead.
Interviewed in the summer of 2009, Clarence
Mitchell (who now works part-time for Freud International, owned by
Matthew Freud, Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-law) defended himself against
accusations that he had been guilty of ‘spin’ about the disappearance of
Madeleine, and then said: “Can I suggest that, actually, you quote me
back accurately? I said: ‘I believe Kate and Gerry are not responsible
for Madeleine’s
death’.”
Months later, on
11 December 2009, at a Court hearing in Lisbon in connection with their
1.2 million euro claim against Goncalo Amaral, Dr Gerald McCann told a
gaggle of reporters: “There is no evidence that we were involved in
Madeleine’s
death”.
So, both Dr Gerald
McCann and his Chief Public Relations Adviser, Clarence Mitchell, within
a few months of each other, referred specifically to Madeleine’s
‘death’.
Do they perhaps acknowledge that Madeleine is dead?
Or was it just a ‘Freudian slip’?
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[Ends]
Original thread: https://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t521-how-many-more-false-sightings-will-there-be-of-madeleine-mccann-article
