Madeleine McCann Not In Malta Or Morocco
FROM Paulo Reis in Portugal:
Portuguese CID spokesman, about Madeleine abduction: “The clue to this mistery is in Praia da Luz”
Portuguese authorities have dismissed as groundless all leads on sightings of Madeleine McCann in other countries rather than Portugal, namely in Morroco and Malta, said Polícia Judiciária (PJ), Portuguese CID, spokesman Olegário de Sousa (…) Further investigations are being carried out centered mainly on the area of Praia da Luz itself, said Mr. Olegário de Sousa. «The clue to this mistery is in Praia da Luz», according to other police source quoted by Diário de Notícias. (…)
Note: Kate and Gerry McCann are innocent.
Posted: 9th, July 2007 | In: Madeleine McCann Comments (6,189) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
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November 20th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
[...] Madeleine McCann Not In Malta Or MoroccoAnorak - Millionaire businessman Brian Kennedy, 47, who has helped fund the couple’s campaign to find their daughter, said: “We’ve carried out our own tests which found no trace of Madeleine in the hire car.” Portuguese police have claimed Maddy’s [...]
November 20th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
Portuguese police made Kate and Gerry McCann arguidos - formal suspects - after allegedly finding “bodily fluids” belonging to Madeleine in the boot of the McCanns Renault Scenic hire car.
It has been reported that police believe that Madeleine’s body had been transported in the rental car, weeks after she accidentally died in the holiday apartment, perhaps from an overdose of sedatives.
They are said to be awaiting the results of DNA tests from a laboratory in Birmingham to confirm their suspicions.
Last night it emerged that lawyers working for the couple had hired independent forensic scientists to examine the car, which had been kept in a garage of an Algarve holiday villa after they returned to the UK.
Brian Kennedy, the wealthy business man who is funding the McCann’s own efforts to investigate their daughter’s disappearance, confirmed the tests had taken place.
“We did our own tests on the hire car and found no traces of Madeleine,” he said.
He said that the tests had been carried out by a team of independent Home Office accredited pathologists and were completely reliable.
The forensic team also examined hairs belonging to Madeleine’s siblings, twins Sean and Amelie, 2, but found no trace of them ever having been given sedatives.
Madeleine, who was three years old at the time, went missing from her parents holiday apartment in Praia da Luz on May 3.
November 20th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Witness: ‘I saw Murat’s lover in same Moroccan town as Madeleine’
Last updated at 16:28pm on 20th November 2007
Investigators are probing sensational claims Robert Murat’s girlfriend was seen in a small Moroccan town on the same day as a possible sighting of Madeleine McCann.
A witness has told the McCanns’ private detectives she saw Michaela Walczuch, 34, in Zaio, in the north of the country, on June 15.
Minutes earlier the witness had seen a young blonde girl she believes was Madeleine being dragged across the street by a North African woman.
Isabel Gonzalez, 60, said today: “I have always been sure the girl I saw in Morocco was Madeleine, and now I am equally sure the blonde woman I saw that day in the town was Murat’s girlfriend.”
Mother-of-six Isabel reported the sighting to police later that evening.
She also gave Spanish detectives a detailed description of a blonde northern European woman she had seen hanging around the town with a mystery man.
On Monday morning she contacted the McCanns’ private detectives to claim the woman she saw was German-born Ms Walczuch.
She made the phonecall after seeing television news reports linking Ms Walczuch to Madeleine’s disappearance.
Detectives from Metodo 3 have previously spoken to a witness who says they saw Ms Walczuch with a girl who looked like Madeleine on May 5, two days after the youngster disappeared.
The sighting was said to have taken place in Portugal 100 miles from the Algarve resort of Praia da Luz where the McCanns were holidaying.
November 20th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Hi Lauren
There you go again,your first sentence after watching the ” PANORAMA ” program is to say:
” Cant say that it helped the McCanns cause that much.”
You are more obsessed with how the McCann’s looked on t.v than showing any concern for Madeleine.
November 20th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Watched the Panorama programme. Cant say that it helped the McCanns cause that much. To listen to Gerry saying they had left the children alone for 6 nights already and had established this kind of routine. of checking on them. And Jane Tanner commenting on the person she saw carrying the child, thinking they were a bad parent, because the child had no socks on and it was cold ?? Meanwhile, she is walking back to check on her children, who have been left all alone, so she could go and eat and drink! - pot calling kettle black i would have said. The whole thing seemed like a PR exercise. Again not a genuine scrap of emotion from either of the McCanns, all very controlled, all very staged. And this was some sort of home video, so they could have been themselves, let their guards down.
I feel its long over due that someone should have sat them down by now and said what the hell were you thinking? To hear Kate McCann sitting their saying she is a good parent, and that comment is not challenged at all. Also Kate saying, that predator, who took Madeleine, HELLO??? Would he have been able to take her, if you and your husband were where you were supposed to be?? Talk about deluding yourself. As they say denial, is not just a river in Egypt! A good parent doesnt take their child on holiday, leave them in childrens clubs all day so you can do your own thing. Then pack them off to bed so you can again, go out and do your own thing. That holiday had nothing to do with any of those children, all of the parents it seems, were just as selfish as each other.
My heart just cries for Madeleine every time i think of her. I just wish she could be found. Just for once, a good news story. Give her a chance to at least get her life back whilst she is still young enough.
Mike - you made a comment that the anti Mcs seem to very rarely talk about Madeleine. I disagree. I find the people on here who just love to spout on and on about Kate and Gerry McCann have lost their focus. Maddie is mentioned in passing, almost as an afterthought at times. Sadly Madeleine McCann is the reason we are all here, not for her selfish parents. They have their own support networks. Who does Maddie have?
I dont think the M3 are genuine. As already has been said on here, i think they are milking it for the money. Wasnt it them who were 100% sure Maddie was in Morocco? That they were hours from finding her. And now here they go again………………………….Meanwhile, Madeleine McCann, if she is still alive, is somewhere, just waiting for her Mummy and Daddy to come save her
November 20th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
5010 - Love that post. India Knight took the words right out of mouth and summed it up completely….lol I was guilty of saying half the things India’s written including “I’d look a bloody mess if that happened to me, I wouldn’t care about my hair and make-up” !!!!!!
5011 - Hoorah, could the net be closing in on that slimeball Murat, his girlfriend and Luis Antonio ! It wouldn’t surprise me if RM’s mother and Aunt are heavily involved and part of the paedophile ring that abducted Madeleine.
November 20th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
5002 - Annie1,
What I find difficult to understand is the reason why people like you and Teresa (I think Teresa also commented on a dead body being in the apartment - I apologise if I’m wrong) come on these forums if you believe Madeleine is dead or will never be seen again…what is the point ?
Unless of course it’s to try and spread your negativity well unfortunatley it won’t work on this thread as we are all united in the fact that we believe Madeleine IS alive and WILL be returned eventually….when? we don’t know and who took her? we don’t know.
5009 - Mike
“The anti-McCann brigade are only interested in bringing down Kate and Gerry and rarely even mention Madeleine”
Reply: SORRY MIKE I DON’T AGREE WITH YOU……
They DO have another interest……bringing down anyone who doesn’t join in the nasty name-calling of the McCann’s. The Anti-McCann brigade can see no middle ground and think that if you don’t join in their vicious little witch hunt then you MUST be Pro-McCann adn think leaving children alone is okay…….it always comes back to the ‘kids alone’ scenario - they just can’t seem to move on from it !!!!!!!! SAD, VERY SAD BUT TRUE.
November 20th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
McCann detectives blame Murat and two friends for snatching Madeleine
Last updated at 13:24pm on 20th November 2007
Robert Murat: His mother says he was at her villa all evening on May 3
Private detectives hired by the McCanns to investigate their daughter’s disappearance have launched a bid to blame Robert Murat and two of his friends for Madeleine’s kidnap.
Last night’s BBC Panorama documentary revealed that private detectives hired by the couple are investigating claims that a witness saw a child who looked like Madeleine with a man and woman on May 5, two days after she disappeared from the family’s holiday apartment.
The unnamed witness was said to have identified one of the couple as Michaela Walczuch, Murat’s girlfriend, an accusation that has been strenuously denied by Walczuch.
Today, the McCanns’ private detectives stoked up a fresh row with Murat by claiming to be investigating a theory that he, along with Walczuch and her estranged husband Luis Antonio, was directly involved in Madeleine’s disappearance.
Murat’s girlfriend’s husband Luis Antonio, who works as a pool cleaner at the Mark Warner resort
The detectives are said to believe that the three may have been part of an organised ring that snatched Madeleine as she slept in the family’s apartment in Praia da Luz on May 3rd.
But Murat and his friends have reacted with fury to the allegations.
Yesterday, Robert Murat’s mother accused friends of Kate and Gerry McCann of ‘lying’.
Jenny Murat, 71, said it was impossible her son was involved in Madeleine’s disappearance as he had been at home in the villa they share in Praia da Luz throughout the evening of May 3.
Mrs Murat told the BBC: “I just don’t know why they are lying.
“On May 3 I’d been taking the dogs out, which I do every single night of my life. I got home at about 8pm and Robert was already there, and he was in all of the evening.
“We were sitting in the kitchen talking the whole evening. I would definitely have known, if he’d gone out.”
A family friend Tuck Price said last night any suggestion Ms Walczuch was involved in the case was “ridiculous”, adding: “She would deny that 100 per cent.”
German-born Ms Walczuch, 32, has already told Portuguese detectives exactly where she was on the evenings before and after Madeleine’s disappearance, he said.
The witness is convinced that Walczuch handed Madeleine over to a man in a nearby town just two days after the abduction on the 5th May.
Detectives there are taking the report very seriously and have passed the details to police.
They are linking it to a sighting by the McCanns’ friend Jane Tanner, who saw a man carrying a child away from the couple’s apartment in Praia da Luz.
The witness that has implicated Murat’s girlfriend in the case is said to be sure that the child being put into a car was Madeleine.
Along with the McCanns, Murat remains an official suspect in the case but he will not learn of the police evidence against him until next year, it has been reported.
Officers have until January to decide if they will lift his arguido status or press charges against him, according to the Portuguese newspaper Correio da Manha.
November 20th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
The public is to blame for the heartless abuse being heaped on Kate McCann. The internet has blurred the lines of news and hearsay and the result is trial by global gossip. by India Knight
Do you find yourself strangely drawn to articles about the McCanns? I do. It’s not edifying: most of us are uncomfortably aware that the slender line where personal tragedy becomes popular entertainment was crossed some time ago. But, like every other person in the country, the story is permanently at the back of my mind.
I want to stop reading, listening, watching, Googling, amateur sleuthing; I nauseate myself with my own prurience. My appetite for commentary – which is all that’s left, in the absence of hard facts – has been sated many times over. But I can’t stop.
Did they do it? They couldn’t have. And yet . . . And if they did do it, do they have superhuman powers, such as invisibility and Oscar-worthy acting skills? And if they didn’t, and are innocent and probably bereaved, what in God’s name have we done to them?
By that “we”, I don’t for once mean the (British) press, which seems to me, despite its inevitable mawkish descents into sentimentality, to have acted pretty responsibly. The press has urged caution, expressed compassion and been reluctant to judge the McCanns, if not the apparently sham-bolic Portuguese police.
No, by “we”, I mean the public. Forget that old chestnut “I blame the media”: now that everyone has an opinion and an embarrassment of outlets in which to express it, “I blame the public” is going to become the refrain of the coming decades. There is no shortage of online places where people may freely and anonymously air their opinions, even if their opinions are vile or demented or both; and there are millions of these newly voluble people. They have made it all right to say unspeakable things, to air the most shameful thoughts, always to think the worst, and never to give anyone a chance.
With the McCann story, this has, for the first time, resulted in a complete blurring of the boundaries between news and gossip. Sky News lists Madeleine McCann as a “category” on its interactive content screen: news, business, sport, Madeleine.
We have been here before with appalling crimes that grip the nation – we may have discussed, say, the James Bulger case among ourselves, watched the news and read the headlines, but then the news was on twice a day, the headlines came only in the morning, and the internet barely existed.
Now we have streaming information, an unstoppable torrent of truth, fiction, theory and gossip that is accessible 24 hours a day. The result is that, incredible as it may sound, there is, online (and the real world is catching up quickly), little difference in the tone of the remarks about Britney Spears’s failed comeback, and the comments made about Kate McCann, despite the fact that one is a pop star and the other the mother of a missing girl who may be dead. But there is no thought for Kate McCann’s suffering in the deluge of abuse heaped upon her; the McCanns’ local newspaper’s support website in Leicester-shire had to be closed.
We seem to have lost track of why Kate McCann’s picture-editor-pleasing face – blonde, thin, wounded, Diana-like – is in the papers in the first place. By orchestrating the kind of media campaign more usually associated with a multi-million-pound film or music launch, the McCanns have catapulted themselves into the gossip fodder league. That means suffocating 24/7 media interest; it means your choice of earrings is going to be scrutinised and discussed by millions of strangers – it means you have declared open season on yourself when it comes to public consumption.
But the public doesn’t just consume: it devours. And once you’ve invited it in, it doesn’t sit down politely and make small talk: it makes itself at home and rifles through your underwear drawer. You can’t ask it to leave, to “respect your privacy”. It’s there for the duration. If the McCanns are innocent, and even if they aren’t, it may well cause them to lose their sanity.
Despite popular thinking about journalists “making things up”, the traditional media are regulated. Things have to stand up from every angle. Facts matter. We have lawyers; we try not to libel or slander; to keep objective. The public, through the internet, can – and does – say anything, no matter how degrading or toxic, and keeps on saying it until, by a sort of insane osmosis, it stops being an outright lie and becomes a half-truth.
The theory that Kate McCann, a doctor, accidentally oversedated her daughter, causing death, has existed on the internet for months. People write about it LIKE THIS, in indignant capitals, as if it were so obvious as to be a given, and as though they were explaining something simple and obvious to somebody mulishly stupid who refused to see the truth staring them in the face. Behind the capitals, you can almost feel their quickening breath and their peculiar excitement as they comprehensively trash the reputation of a grieving woman who is a stranger to them. Power to the people!
Things are ugly out there – there aren’t many things uglier than gossip about infanticide, which is what this story has become, and why it feels so extraordinary. But they have been ugly from the start.
The news of Madeleine’s disappearance broke on a Friday evening. I wrote about it the following morning, assuming – naively, in retrospect – that people’s default mode would be compassion or pity. By Sunday evening my e-mail inbox was full. A handful of the e-mails agonised on the McCanns’ behalf. The greater part more or less said, “If you leave small children alone to go and eat tapas, you deserve everything that’s coming to you.”
I know from colleagues on other newspapers that they had the same angry reaction, which they also found themselves disconcerted by.
I’ll get back to the tapas point, because it’s central to the whole thing, with opinion dividing into people who see leaving a child as stupid, but not the world’s greatest crime – such people are broadly sympathetic to the McCanns – and people who find it inexcusable, criminal and indicative of all sorts of dark possibilities. This latter group is among the 17,000 who signed an online petition recommending that Leices-tershire social services take into care the McCanns’ remaining two children, Sean and Amelie.
The petition was not set up in the past week or so when things became murkier and question marks started mushrooming, but in May, when all we knew of Kate and Gerry McCann was that they seemed hollow-eyed with grief. The McCann story may end up being about the death of empathy.
So here we are, obsessed, in the throes of one of those weird national seizures; sitting in judgment, wallowing in what the novelist Philip Roth (apropos Bill Clinton’s infidelity) memorably called “the ecstasy of sanctimony”. The woman at the checkout at Tesco has a view, as does the dinner party guest. The hitherto unsayable – “Do you think they killed their own child?” – has become commonplace. You hear it everywhere. We’re gossiping about a four-year-old child who may be dead, or abducted and raped, or both, and there are no holds barred any more. What brutal thing does this say about us?
It’s always risky attempting to analyse the nation’s psyche based on one apparently seismic event: often, when everything settles down, you realise that underneath all the emoting, there wasn’t anything terribly unexpected happening. One thinks of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales: all that was going on was that everyone felt sad and shocked, and then got over it.
But the national fixation with the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and the incendiary emotions it has provoked, is another thing altogether. It isn’t to do with empathy, because it seems to be thin on the ground. Prurience, yes; ghoulish curiosity, certainly – but there are, alas, dozens of hideous crime stories to pick from: why focus so obsessively on this one? Sentimentality, because of the involvement of a small, photogenic child? Perhaps at first – though much of the public commentary on this story is so condemnatory that sentiment doesn’t seem to come into it.
That says something peculiar about our monstrous appetite for this tragedy – because, no matter what happened or who did what, a much-loved child has vanished.
Much of our fixation has to do with fear, and with the public’s desire to “own” a story. Within 24 hours of her disappearance, Madeleine McCann had become “Maddie”, as though we all knew her. Aside from what she looked like, we knew nothing about her whatsoever – not what toys she liked, “Cuddle Cat” aside, or what her favourite book was, or what she liked eating, or wearing (I am sorry to use the past tense, and mean nothing by it; the present tense looks even odder).
But in those early days of the investigation, she became a version of all of our children, a blank to superimpose our own child’s face onto as we peered into the abyss. This was, of course, terrifying: the idea that an ordinary-seeming family could go on holiday and have a child vanish into thin air was more than most of us could cope with.
The natural human instinct, when faced with a terrible fear, is to list the things that make us different from the victims of the frightening situation, and in this particular case there were few. Much was made at the time of the McCanns’ social class (working class gone middle), and of the fact that if a single mother from a housing estate had gone out on the razz and left her child alone, sympathy would be in short supply. This is another way of saying that if a person is recognisably different from us, the bad thing that happened to them couldn’t possibly happen to us. The problem with the McCanns is that they were so terrifyingly normal-seeming, so middle-classly resonant, with their neat Boden-esque clothes and their responsible jobs and their three little children.
How to differentiate ourselves from them, and thereby reassure ourselves that their misfortune would never be ours? By focusing obsessively on the one questionable thing they did: leaving their children alone in a strange place. Phew – instant relief. “I’d never do that,” the thought process went. “I’m safe. My children will never be harmed.”
This is clutching at straws, frankly – as everyone surely knows by now, children who come to harm usually come to harm from a person known to them, more often than not in their own home. But we chose to clutch at this one particular straw, hence, I think, the disproportionate outpouring of vitriol against Kate McCann, who, regardless of her guilt or innocence, was, is and will continue to be punished because she had the temerity to seem so much like us.
She has also (more straws) been accused of seeming “unfeeling”, of looking “too groomed” (“I’d look a mess, therefore we’re not the same, therefore it could never happen to me”), of seeming strangely “calm” (or tranquillised, surely?), of, basi-cally, not falling to her knees screaming like an animal in pain – it’s “Show us you care, Ma’am” all over again.
In some internet chatrooms and message boards, women bitch about Kate McCann for not reacting exactly like them – not that they’d know how they’d react in her situation, since they have never been in it. No matter: weird, isn’t it, how she seems so composed – and let’s not call it composure, let’s call it “arrogance” (this from the country that invented the stiff upper lip). Must make her a child killer, and not have anything to do with being told that visible distress might give pleasure to a hypothetical abductor.
And why are her clothes nice? Who thinks about clothes at a time like this? Why does she wash her hair? Couldn’t she wear rags, or sackcloth and ashes? Or – any day now – tar and feathers? And what was that nonsense with the Pope? (Who’d have thought the devout Catholic/Pope combination would be so perplexing and aggravating to so many people?)
Our fascination also exists because this story is centrally concerned with what many people perceive as a failure of parenting, a topic we are obsessed by as a nation. We are, collectively, eaten up with anxiety about raising our children. It’s a relatively new thing – people just used to have children and get on with it – and is reflected by the deluge of television programmes, books and publications devoted to how to be a parent.
Women, especially, have become almost pathologically insecure on the subject: am I a bad person if I bottle-feed; have I failed if I have a caesarean; do I harm my children by going out to work; have they got enough friends; do they sleep too much or too little; do they eat enough super-foods and fish oils; do they need to learn Mandarin; do they play outside enough; and so on and on.
With that insecurity comes the strongest desire to judge, as a means of self-reassurance: you see it every day in the ongoing working mothers versus stay-at-home ones debate. “Well, she barely sees her children because she’s in the office all day, so I’m better than her and my children will be happier” versus “She’s going out of her mind with boredom because she’s stopped working, so I’m better than her” – nobody can win, and the crazy thing is that nobody needs to: it’s hardly a competition.
Into this comes Kate McCann, who admits to a failure of parenting, to doing a stupid thing, and we fall on her like a pack of hyenas, weirdly pleased to leave behind our own failings and insecurities for a minute and concentrate on hers.
The fact is that while I would never leave small children alone, I know dozens of people who routinely do, and I do not find them irresponsible, just tired.
There are so many of them that a whole service industry has built up around them: “family” hotels with a baby-listening service where someone cocks an ear at the bedroom door every now and then while harassed parents try to grab the semblance of a date together in the dining room; holidays, like the McCanns’, with kids’ clubs attached, where children are parked with what amounts to a stranger while parents try to sunbathe in peace for a couple of hours; skiing trips where the chalet comes complete with a random nanny; gyms with crèches; restaurants with some weird bloke in a clown suit “entertaining” the children in another room; and so on.
A certain section of society routinely leaves their children in the care of somebody else whom they don’t know terribly well, no matter what the nanny agency has murmured soothingly about police checks. You can think what you like about this, but it is a fact of middle-class life, trying to reconcile loving your children with still having a life of your own, and an omnipresent source of anxiety for many people – if it weren’t, you couldn’t buy teddies with cameras hidden in them to check up on your child carer, and many women wouldn’t have the unpleasant niggling feeling that they don’t entirely trust their nanny to bring up their child.
The McCanns were foolish and wrong to leave three small children – babies, really – alone in a strange apartment. But doesn’t the subsequent calamity override the initial human error? Apparently not: only a fifth of Britons think they are completely innocent, according to a poll for this paper today. And 76% think they were wrong to leave them alone. And yet we all take risks: you take a risk every time you let a child out of your sight, every time they board a bus or a train, every time they’re a bit evasive about their whereabouts. If your house is burgled and you stupidly didn’t switch on the burglar alarm, does that mean you deserved it? Does it make your distress, your sense of violation and the loss of your goods any less significant?
Meanwhile, with hideous inevitability, the focus has shifted to Kate McCann’s being “volatile”. She “visi-bly lost control” while being questioned for 11 hours, we are told. It’s such a depressingly familiar scenario: a woman in an untenable situation is pushed to breaking point, and then when she does lose it – as lose it she will, because she’s not a robot or a monster – her sane response to an insane, unbearable set of circumstances becomes evidence with which to condemn her.
Impound her diary, call in all lap-tops: she must have done it if she shows any feelings. And she must have done it if she doesn’t. QED: she’s had it either way.
We are now told, by Portuguese newspapers who claim to have published extracts, that her diary, which the police want to see, shows she “struggled to control Madeleine”, that her children were “hyperac-tive”, and that looking after them exhausted her.
She also allegedly wrote that her husband left her to look after them too much on her own. Show me a woman with three children under four who doesn’t express the same frustrations, and I’ll show you an improbability. But even this utterly normal maternal response to child-care – it’s knackering, I wish he’d help out more – is being used as an indication of Mrs McCann’s “instability”.
And the people who’ve been there and ought to be able to sympa-thise – other women – are the ones sharpening their knives. As Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state, once said: “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” If that is so, hell must have got pretty crowded over the past four months.
The McCanns did themselves no favours when they embarked, deliberately, on a gigantic, modern publicity campaign. And that has contributed in no small part to making this case seem so compelling now. It is hard to criticise their original motive for hyping up the publicity, but in the process the McCanns unwittingly turned themselves into a soap opera: available to view on a screen near you 24 hours a day.
As I write, there are reports that they’re looking for a new, bigger “campaign manager” to try to stem the tide of negative comment. (In what world did Gerry McCann think it was a good idea to put in an “appearance” at the Edinburgh television festival?) But it’s too late. The tide won’t be stemmed and the appointment of a Max Clifford figure will make things worse, not better. Every soap needs a baddie and since we seem to have forgotten that we’re not, in fact, watching a brilliantly scripted and plotted episode of Portuguese Holiday, it was only a matter of time before the goodie turned bad.
What a twist! How compelling! More, more. Give me the inside story. One of these mornings, we’re going to wake up and see just how ghastly a part our own voyeurism has played in all of this. At least, I hope we are.
November 20th, 2007 at 10:52 am
Hi Annie 1
you said:
” That poor little girl, in my opinion, will never been seen again ”
You, thank God are in the minority , and if that’s what you think then why continue to post , everyone that posts on this forum believes that Madeleine will be found and are being positive. The anti-McCann brigade are only interested in bringing down Kate and Gerry and rarely even mention Madeleine.
We are fed up of repeating ourselves on here , when we say that they should not have left their children alone that night, it was wrong..now thats the last time i’m going to say it..Madeleine is alive and will be found.
November 20th, 2007 at 6:39 am
Hi all
The Mirror article highlights that Madeleine’s DNA was NOT to be found in the car. All that they seem to have against the McCanns now is the behaviour of the sniffer dogs.
This article highlights that Rebelo is thoroughly re-assessing the whole case and that ‘the Portuguese police insist that all avenues of inquiry remain open. The Portuguese Authorities should allow Rebelo to re-question the Tapas 9 group and put an end to speculation. You wonder why they wont, especially taking into account that R. Murat was the translator.
THE DAILY EXPRESS
AGAIN ‘DECEIVED’: Father Jose
Tuesday November 20,2007
By Nick Fagge in Praia da Luz
DETECTIVES have carried out fresh searches at the church where Kate and Gerry McCann prayed for their missing daughter, it emerged yesterday.
The Roman Catholic priest who offered comfort to the distraught parents and gave the couple their own set of keys to the chapel has also been reinterviewed by investigators.
Portuguese police carried out a detailed search at Our Lady Of Light church in Praia da Luz and the surrounding area, including the old cemetery.
The operation was carried out “informally and with maximum discretion” by agents from the Policia Judiciaria as they followed up leads into possible hiding places for Madeleine’s body.
Officers “spent the day” with Father Jose Manuel Pacheco, questioning him for several hours and also visiting him at home.
Detectives want to understand the precise nature of the relationship between the McCanns and Father Jose and what involvement the 16th century church itself played during the five months the couple were in the Algarve.
The priest became a close friend and confidante of the McCanns after Madeleine’s disappearance on May 3.
The couple, who are devoted Catholics, attended Mass most Sundays and also participated in several candle-lit vigils at the tiny church.
Father Jose even gave the couple, from Rothley, Leics, their own set of keys so they could pray in private whenever they wished.
He has since been reprimanded by the church authorities for allowing himself to get so close to the couple.
The Bishop of the Algarve, Dom Manuel Quintas, was particularly critical of his decision to give church keys to the McCanns.
Father Jose has previously said he felt “deceived” in connection with the investigation but has never clarified what he meant by this statement.
A friend of Father Jose yesterday said the priest had changed since the Madeleine affair, which had deeply affected him. He has moved out of the clerical house he used to share with other priests in the parish and now lives with his elderly parents.
He has also almost completely stopped going out. The friend said: “Whenever anybody talks about Madeleine he steers the talk on to other subjects. He has stopped going to all the places he used to go, especially the coffee shops.
“There are two completely different Pachecos, the one before the McCanns and the one after.”
The latest searches took place two weeks ago on the orders of Paulo Rebelo, Portugal’s second most senior policeman, who took over the investigation last month.
He has re-examined the entire case and even ordered a re-enactment of the night Madeleine went missing from the family’s holiday apartment.
Detectives visited Father Jose at his parents’ home in Odiaxere, about 10 miles from Praia da Luz and close to the Barragem da Bravura lake which detectives searched last month for the body of the missing four-year-old girl.
Officers then followed the priest to the church in a separate car in order to be discreet and avoid unwanted attention.
Last night it was unclear whether Father Jose had been asked to make a formal statement as a witness in the case or if officers had searched his home.
It is possible they asked him if he had ever taken confession from either of the McCanns, although Father Jose has previously said he would never reveal anything he had been told during confession.
Police sources have said in the past that they believe Madeleine to be dead and “either on the bottom of the ocean or in the church”. Some officers believe that the toddler died after an accident in the holiday apartment and that her body was disposed of more than three weeks later.
It has been suggested the body was hidden in the church or its grounds and then taken away in the boot of the McCanns’ Renault Scenic hire car.
However, after more than 200 days since Madeleine’s disappearance, Portuguese police insist that all avenues of inquiry remain open.
November 20th, 2007 at 6:18 am
Hi all
Today’s Daily Mirror article.
MADDY: THREE ACCUSED
EXCLUSIVE Investigators think friends may have plotted kidnap
By Graham Brough And Martin Fricker 20/11/2007
Three friends may have been behind Madeleine McCann’s kidnap, investigators claimed last night.
Private detectives fear Robert Murat, girlfriend Michaela Walczuch and her estranged husband Luis Antonio were part of an organised ring that snatched the four-year-old. Pool cleaner Antonio worked at the resort where Maddy vanished and had full access to the complex.
He could have spied on her before the plot was hatched.
A source said: “The connection would appear to be very significant.”
Investigators claim Antonio, 47, could have easily got German-born Walczuch into the secure Mark Warner resort at Praia da Luz.
Yesterday the 34-year-old was named by the Mirror as the woman spotted bundling a child into a car two days after Maddy vanished.
At the time she was living with Antonio, who worked at the pool where Gerry and Kate McCann took their three children daily.
We can also reveal new witness statements taken recently claim Murat - an “arguido” in the case - was spotted near Maddy’s holiday apartment the night she vanished, despite him insisting he was at home nearby.
He returned next day and became an unofficial translator for police - giving him access to statements. It is claimed he told some workers at the complex to speak to him if they had information before going to the police.
Our source added: “This phase of the investigation has found many people linking Murat to the scene that night.
“It seems significant he is denying it despite multiple sightings.
“Putting himself forward as a translator on that first chaotic morning afterwards also put him well in place to get the inside track of the investigation, perhaps cleverly, it may transpire.
“I would be amazed if Murat is not questioned again very soon over these new findings.”
Portuguese sources claim the ex-pat could be further quizzed this week.
Yesterday Walczuch - who lives in Lagos, near Praia da Luz - refused to comment on claims she was seen with a girl resembling Madeleine in central Portugal on May 5. Murat’s lawyer Francisco Pagarete was with her. He said: “These allegations are ridiculous.”
Independent forensic tests of Kate and Gerry’s hire car in Portugal found none of Madeleine’s DNA, it emerged last night.
Home Office-approved pathologists carried out the examinations.
Millionaire businessman Brian Kennedy, 47, who has helped fund the couple’s campaign to find their daughter, said: “We’ve carried out our own tests which found no trace of Madeleine in the hire car.”
Portuguese police have claimed Maddy’s DNA was found in the boot of the Renault Scenic and insist her body was there.
November 20th, 2007 at 1:12 am
Hi all
I found this on the Mirror forum. It’s from a Portuguese poster.
”This is some news from Portugal I posted at the other forum, but they don’t seem to have found their way to the MF, and that would be a pity, since they should have all pro-McCanns ordering crates of the finest champagne while feverishly posting threads about these news with the blessing of the esteemed Mods.
It’s very simple: from next Jan. 3, Portugal’s notorious “secrecy laws” are being turned into its very opposite: under the old laws, essentially everything pertaining to a judicial case was secret; now, in a 180 degree turn, essentially everything is to be made public.
And the relevant consequence is that from Jan. 3 on ALL THE EVIDENCE COLLECTED BY THE PJ REGARDING THE MCCANNS AND HANDED OVER TO THE JUDGE ON SEPT. 10 WILL BE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN.
Now the obvious reason champagne bottle caps should be popping up at any minute now in the pro-MC camp is because, as you pro-McCanns have been insisting all along, the PJ has not any evidence against the McCanns, or at best it’s “contaminated” beyond hope — nothing else would be expectable from the Moo Cops, right endreas?
So from Jan. 3 — rejoice, pro-McCs!!! — all the PJ’s incompetence, bluffing, indeed their frame-up of the McCanns, should be exposed! We should have confirmation that indeed the DNA forensics are 100% INconclusive (as a poster with an alleged source at the FSS is stating right now elsewhere in the MF), that the notorious “4,000 pages” are mostly blank or at best filled with doodles, that the 40 questions put to Kate were actually only one, to the effect of “Aren’t you ashamed to have killed your daughter?” repeated 40 times and forcing the Portuguese Leonor Cipriano to bravely refuse to answer it 40 times (I’m not making this up, essentially this suggestion was posted here in all seriousness), etc., etc.
Now please note that is will happen regardless of whether the McCanns are charged or the case is filed away; at the very most, alleging that the case is especially complex, the secrecy laws can be prorogued for a further 90 days and no more. Also, the arguidos can request that the case, or parts of it, not be made public, but they’d would have to convince a judge that the reasons were valid (and the McCanns, being completely innocent, surely won’t file such a request, not THEM!). The judge, in turn, can decide not to make the case public, but again he’ll have to invoke very ponderous reasons, such as fear of social unrest or harm to public morality.
So am I right in having assumed this news would have pro-McCanns deliriously happy?
Of course, if the impossible, according to pro-McCanns, turns out to be true (of course that would imply the highly unlikely prospect that Moo Cops exist only in xenophobic minds) and the PJ does indeed have solid evidence against the McCanns… from Jan. 3 we should be able to know everything about Gerry’s 14 text messages, the “how to hide a corpse” book found in the Apt., every word that was said in all the interrogations carried out so far (McCanns, Murat, the Tapas merry band…), the smallest details of the preliminary report on the forensics received by the PJ on Sept. 10, what was said in the May 23 meeting between Buck, Kate & Gerry on one side and Olegário Sousa and Luís Neves of the PJ on the other, what’s really on Kate’s diary… — I could go on… even without speculating on what evidence the PJ may have but devilishly decided not to disclose… but it would be pointless because you’re just so SURE that it’s not going be the case, right pro-McCanns? The PJ have NOTHING, or VERY little, right?
Special note to Clarence Mitchell: take a break tonight and go out to have a few drinks! You deserve it! The “heinous crime” you accused the Portuguese police and authorities of committing against the McCanns in the statement you made when you became their official PR on Sept. 18 will be exposed! Because, you see, otherwise it’s a VERY serious charge that should not go uncontested… ”
November 20th, 2007 at 12:21 am
On watching the Panorama programme it has now become clear to me why Gerry McCann and his tennis partner didn’t notice Jane Tanner. From the diagram she was walking up from the entrance to the Ocean Club, the two men were talking on the other side of the road, and when she had actually passed them she saw the man carrying the child go across the top of the road. At 9.15 it would have been pitch black, and there doesn’t seem to be many lights on the roads, therefore that would explain the fact that Gerry + 1 didn’t notice her, especially if they were deep in conversation, and also knowing the lack of observation powers of men in general, they certainly wouldn’t notice a man carrying a child at the end of the road.
I felt that Jane Tanner’s voice shook because she was exceptionally nervous and full of emotion, because she will forever feel that she should have done something (but hindsight is a very useful commodity after the event).
What also struck me was the fact that when they went to Heluva in the car it was packed full of leaflets, a cameraman and their reporter friend, there wouldn’t have been any room for a body!!! And I am sure he would have noticed one!!! Also, when the Portuguese police told them that they were going to search the new accommodation, the McCanns and friends left the villa and the car. Who is to say that the car wasn’t tampered with during the search???? and the incriminating evidence put at that time.
November 20th, 2007 at 12:00 am
Mike, I think your phrase can be used on one or two others …..
I see a pigeon’s flown into the wrong coop !!!
November 19th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
Hi All
Just re-reading other stuff and came across this so thought I would post it to remind ourselves about Murat, his girlfriend and her ‘husband’. I remember reading it all when it first came to light and thought it was a very odd state of affairs. Also, as far as Murat’s mum saying he was at home with her all night, what happened about the sighting of him in the Irish man’s bar on the night of 3 May when he was ‘half cut’. Nothing else has been mentioned about that!!!
The expat, the German blonde and her ex-husband: Madeleine suspect’s strange love affair
Last updated at 11:52am on 16th May 2007
Robert Murat, the only official suspect in the disappearance of four-year-old Madeleine McCann in Portugal, had been living with his blonde German lover and her ex-husband in the same house.
Locals in the Algarve said the love triangle trio also went out socially. Mr Murat was living with his lover and her ex-husband. Neighbour Maria Pereira, 37, said Murat’s girlfriend Michaela and her ex-husband Luis had a blonde daughter and added: “They were definitely a couple but Robert had been staying too, for a few months - certainly since Christmas.” The Portugese police kept all three under surveillance for a week before questioning them on Monday. Murat, the son of an English mother and a Portuguese property developer father, had previously embarked on an affair with a married woman, Dawn, who would later become his wife. They lived in Norwich with their daughter Sofia, now four, who neighbours say is the “spitting image” of the missing Madeleine. “At first glance, if you saw them walking down the street you would think they (Sofia and Madeleine) were twins,” neighbour Geoffrey Livock, 71 said.
Luis Antonio and Michaela Walczuch: Lived for a time with Mr Murat
Friend and former car sales colleague Gareth Bailey said Murat decided to start a permanent new life in Portugal at the end of 2004, and emigrated with Dawn and their daughter. But after just a few months Dawn returned to England with the marriage in tatters.
In conversations with reporters, Murat reportedly said he and his ex-wife were now fighting a custody battle over their little girl.
“One minute they seemed perfectly happy and were excited at their new life in Portugal, and the next Dawn was home,” a friend told an English newspaper.
“It was obvious something had gone terribly wrong but she would not talk about what had happened.”
It was during this time that Mr Murat met Michaela Walczuch, a pretty blonde German divorcee, who was a sales person at the Remax property company he joined in April 2005.
According to company director Mr Soares, Murat became instantly attracted to Ms Walczuch. She also used the name Matias, believed to be from a former marriage.
Murat and Michaela became a familiar couple around the bars and pavement cafes near the Remax office, often sharing kisses over lunch and laughing in each other’s company.
To outsiders they were indeed an unlikely couple - he the rather ordinary looking Brit and she a Jehovah’s Witness, who reportedly spent some weekends knocking on doors locally in search of converts.
Mr Murat moved companies over the next year and by September 2006 set up a business on his own. During this time Michaela appears to have moved in with her ex-partner, Luis Antonio, in a Lagos apartment that Murat visited regularly.
Likewise, she was a frequent visitor to the villa in Praia da Luz where Murat lived with his mother Jennifer, 71.
By Christmas 2006, neighbours reported Mr Murat was a permanent resident at Ms Walczuch’s and Mr Antonio’s home.
All three have been quizzed by police about the disappearance of Madeleine amid suggestions that they could match CCTV images taken from a petrol station.
However, Miss Walczuch and Mr Antonio, a former estate agent now working as a swimming pool engineer, have been described as witnesses. Sources said there was not enough evidence to charge Mr Murat but that he had not been ruled out of the investigation.
So, suspect or scapegoat? To Kate and Gerry McCann, it probably doesn’t matter. Twelve days on, their little girl is still missing.
————————————————————————————————————————————
Because it has been over six months since Madeleine was abducted people are beginning to forget some of the details which were unearthed early on in the case. I think some of these reports are more true to the case than now, because the press seem to be exaggerating a little bit more now to sell their papers, and we are getting conflicting stories. Whereas at the beginning there was more believable reporting coming out of Praia da Luz.
Lauren - I have had four children, and I don’t think anyone I know was more paranoid than me regarding their safety. After the James Bulger case I actually told a mother off for letting her little boy wander off down a different isle in the local supermarket. She was so busy looking at her shopping list that she didn’t realise he had wandered off. I attacked her by saying had she not heard of Jamie Bulger, and that her child could very easily have been snatched before she would have noticed him missing. I cringe when I see parents let their toddlers run yards in front of them down a busy street, because mine always used to be on reigns. My next door neighbours little boy, aged 4, was killed when his grandfather took him shopping and left him on one side of a busy street whilst he went into a shop on the other side of the road. He told him to ’stay there, he wouldn’t be long’. The child had been run over, killed, and taken away in an ambulance, before he got back and discovered him missing. I think we on this forum are the exception to the rule, parents these days don’t seem to look after their children and wonder what went wrong when something drastic happens. I feel very very sorry for the McCanns, but my heart aches for little Madeleine, she is constantly in my thoughts and I just hope and pray that Kate and Gerry will get the chance to show how much they love her some day soon.
November 19th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
Kirsty - not a snow flake in hells chance of that lot of Private invest. bringing her home - they know that they can milk it for 6 months, the money is there, the McCs.have to be seen to be making an effort to spend SOME of the fund money to actually seem to be looking for Madeleine - do you honestly think that with such a huge reward - 1m. offered initially - that if she was still around there would have been someone, somewhere who would have coughed? That poor little girl, in my opinion, will never been seen again, and regardless of whether her parents are or are not involved in her actual disappearance, they are sure as hell absolutely the reason why she went missing through their blatant neglect
November 19th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
Hi Guys,
I have to say after watching the Panorama programme i’m a little uneasy about the staged interview with their friend, a bit previous and could be percieved as a weird move. Also i wonder what you lot think of Jane Tanner? clearly she was very nervous.
Also, the meal the McC’s had with the senior police officer at his home in Portugal where all the children played together- the police must’ve been using this as a way of gauging them and sussing them out, i think anyway. How odd. Wouldn’t happen here would it???
I am not sure how much this programme would’ve helped them out, or RM watching the turn taking of the conversation wild eyed as if he were at a tennis match (you know what i mean don’t you??!) or even Kates mother divulging that Kate had phoned asking for the Priests phone number the night Maddie went missing???? I just hope that M3 are going to do what they promise and bring that angel home!!
November 19th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Hello all.
The part that really gets to me is when Gerry keeps saying over and over. Or to some extent anyway perhaps not exact words but means; ‘WE REALLY WISH WE WERE THERE WHEN MADELEINE WAS TAKEN, This is really stupid because if they had been there, then she would not have been taken, would she?? I’m totally confused now hows about u lot???
November 19th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
The Portuguese police have decided to dig up the dead,and make them ‘ Arguido’s ‘ if they don’t talk.
Officers carried out a detailed investigation of the church and an old cemetery nearby in a bid to discover whether the four-year-old’s body could have been hidden there in the days following her disappearance.
They have also re-interviewed the Catholic priest at Church of Nossa Senhora da Luz - Our Lady of the Light - in the Algarve resort of Praia da Luz.
Father Jose Manuel Pacheco, 46, became a friend and confidant of Kate and Gerry McCann in the days and weeks following their daughter’s disappearance.
He gave the McCanns keys to the 16th century church overlooking the sea so they could use it as a sanctuary and pray privately whenever they wanted.
The couple, both 39, are devout Catholics and went to Mass at the church most Sundays during the 130 days they spent in the Algarve.
They also attended regular candle lit vigils organised by the local community to pray for Madeleine’s safe return.
Officers from the Policia Judiciaria searched the building a fortnight ago to explore whether the girl’s body could have been hidden there, it was claimed in a Portuguese newspaper.
The search was carried out “informally and with maximum discretion” as part of a review of the case by Paulo Rebelo, Portugal’s second most senior policeman who took over the investigation in early October.
November 19th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
The girlfriend of suspect Robert Murat has denied a claim she was spotted with Madeleine McCann two days after she vanished.
A new witness has identified Michaela Walczuch as a woman seen with the missing girl in central Portugal about 100 miles from where she disappeared on May 3.
The new witness came forward after Madeleine’s parents Kate and Gerry McCann hired Spanish private detective agency Metodo 3 to help find their daughter.
But family friend Tuck Price said any suggestion Ms Walczuch was involved in the case was “ridiculous”, adding: “She would deny that 100 per cent.”
German-born Ms Walczuch, 32, has already told Portuguese detectives exactly where she was on the evenings before and after Madeleine’s disappearance, he said.
McCann family spokesman Clarence Mitchell said private detectives hired by the parents of missing Madeleine McCann say they are a 100 per cent certain that she is still alive.
The investigators claim theories that the four-year-old was killed in her family’s holiday apartment in Portugal are wrong.
Gerry and Kate McCann have been informed of the reported sighting which is being investigated by private detective Francisco Marco.
The McCanns’ spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, said Mr Marco was “very confident”.
“He’s 100 per cent certain that she’s alive and believes that they are ‘very, very close’ to finding the kidnapper,” said Mr Mitchell.
“Naturally we are extremely encouraged by any indication by our investigators that things are going well. But there have been a number of leads that have come to nothing and Kate and Gerry remain cautious.”
The McCanns, both still official suspects in her disappearance, hired agency Metodo3 in September to boost efforts to find their daughter.
Mr Marco, head of a 40-strong-team,said: “We have a six-month agreement with the McCanns.
“We have already spent a month and a half working. I will find her before that period is up.”
And he is certain Mr and Mrs McCann had nothing to do with Madeleine’s disappearance.
“Our staff interviewed the McCanns for ten hours - enough time for us to tell if they were trying to fool us.
“My specialists assure me they are not hiding anything. I would not risk the prestige this agency has gained over 23 years without being convinced there is a case,” he said.
November 19th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
come on the mccanns.fight time.
November 19th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
Hi Isla:
Nice to see you posting again! - Thanks for the show link.. I will take a look.. you are so very thoughtful!!! - I did watch 48 hours mystery on Maddie.. it might be the same thing.. but I’ll take a look……… -
Does anyone here have ship knowledge or know anyone that works at marinas or owns a yacht?? Who might have a helping hand to get some info??
November 19th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
No. 7.
Radio Times
http://www.radiotimes.com/List…..llpage.jsp
November 19th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
No. 6.
Panorama
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/pro…..efault.stm
November 19th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
No. 5
Video trailer
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/n…..amp;news=1
November 19th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
No. 4
McCann friend tells of abduction
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7098390.stm
November 19th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
No. 3
Missing Madeleine ’seen in car’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7100918.stm
November 19th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
Next one.
McCann tells of ‘predator’ belief
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7100377.stm
November 19th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
I’ve posted this for anyone who may not manage to see the programme tonight. I don’t know if I will manage it with so many links. Anyway I’ll have a try!
No I didn’t manage it so I’ll split them up.
Panorama…”What we know”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/pro…..093152.stm