Madeleine McCann: Paedophiles, Belgium And Anna Stam Is Famous

MADDIE WATCH - Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann, Kate McCann and Gerry McCann…

DAILY EXPRESS (front page): “MADELEINE: I SAW HER ON A TRAM.”

All aboard. Here’s some the hacks…

“New sighting is linked to paedophile network.”

Linked by “Scotland Yard”. That’s enough evidence for the Express.

The Sun has more:

An email from John Shord of Scotland Yard’s elite clubs and vice intelligence unit reveals that a ring of child abusers made an order for a young girl just THREE days before Maddie was snatched. Her photo was passed to the gang and the chilling deal concluded.

Grim stuff. But no link to Madeleine McCann.
DAILY MIRROR (front page): “DID THEY SNATCH MADDY”

“First pics of Dutch sighting suspects.”

Says the now famous Anna Stam: “I HOPE THIS WILL HELP KATE IN FINDING HER LITTLE GIRL.”

Anna, who was flown to London by the Mirror to aid the hunt, said: “They fit the faces I remember. I just hope it’s not too late.“

EXCLUSIVE Mirror brings witness Anna to Britain to help in the hunt for Madeleine It is 462 days since Madeleine went missing in Portugal…

As Anorak told you yesterday, Anna Stam is now in Blighty.

Anna, 41, spoke out after the Mirror flew her to London to meet a police artist and representatives of the McCanns. Pledging to instruct investigators to make Anna’s dramatic sighting a priority, family spokesman Clarence Mitchell said: “I’m grateful to the Mirror for bringing her to us. Her evidence could be very significant. Our investigators will interview her in the next few days.”

On one woman’s word, so much has been done. Says the Mirror:

Anna saw the couple with the Madeleine lookalike in her party shop in Amsterdam on May 6 last year.

A lookalike? Says Anna Stam:

“I didn’t like the man, he didn’t look like a nice person. I work in a party shop so most people smile when they come in to buy things.”

That a fact…

“But he didn’t smile back at me when I smiled at him. He had no sparkle in his eyes. He was short with me and seemed angry. I got the feeling he didn’t want me to interfere with him and the others.”

What did he buy? We’re not told. Did he use a credit card? We’re not told. Did he buy anything? We’re not told. Did he pay with cash, and can that cash be traced? We’re not told.

3 sightings in Belgium but police drew blank

One:

Witnesses say the girl looked just like missing Madeleine but minus her fringe. She was first seen by Line Compere, 31, on a 8.45am tram in Brussels on May 15. Line said she was suspicious because the girl was with a couple, she thought were East European, had dark hair and did not look like her…

Swarthy haired people with a blonde child. Sound familiar..?

Two:

Then 12 days later, on May 27, a Briton saw a child asleep on a train from Brussels to Antwerp and thought she might drugged. She was with a balding, 6ft white man aged about 40. He got off at Mechelen at 9.20pm carrying the sleeping girl. Leicestershire police asked Interpol to check stations and CCTV.

Child asleep on night train with fatherly figure.

Three:

Then on June 2, Gilles Crippiau, 33, saw a girl who looked like Madeleine in a shop in Mouscron, west Belgium. He heard a woman, who was with the girl and a man, speaking English and thought she must be a tourist…They put their purchases in a Renault Scenic and drove off. The shop had no CCTV, police files released this week show.

Purchases. Then they can be traced.

DAILY MAIL: “Detectives probe 100 ‘Madeleine sightings’ in Belgium after claims she was stolen to order”

100. Trumps the Mirror’s news, and then some.

Detectives are investigating more than 100 Madeleine McCann ‘ sightings’ in Belgium following a warning she could have been stolen to order for a paedophile ring.

100.

Interpol officials in Brussels said they had received 107 reports since she vanished from Portugal on May 3 last year.

107. Any more?

Private detectives working for Kate and Gerry McCann have said that they will check the most credible sightings.

But what about the incredible sightings? Should they not all be checked? Why is one more credible then another? Remember when Metodo 3, the private detectives, said Madeleine was in Morocco, in the mountains. Incredible?

Interpol official Alain Remue, the chief commanding officer of the Belgium Federal Police’s missing persons unit, said a special hotline had received 107 witness reports related to Madeleine’s disappearance.

He said 67 were too vague to be properly investigated. The remaining 36 were investigated and passed to Interpol’s Lisbon bureau but there was no response from Portugal.

THE SUN: “I spotted Maddie on Belgian tram”

The sighting by supermarket buyer Line Compere came just 12 days after Maddie was snatched from her family’s holiday apartment in Portugal. Line, 31, is one of THREE credible witnesses who say they saw the five-year-old in Belgium during the same period.

Line told The Sun: “I thought it was strange because they didn’t look alike physically. They definitely were not from the same family.”

Her suspicions were further aroused when the three seemed to be communicating in different languages.

She said: “The couple looked to me as if they came from East Europe and were between 35 and 40. It looked as if life had taken its toll on them — they looked rough. The little girl was dancing in the tram and at one point they told her to sit down. She was dressed as if she were going to the beach, with plastic beach shoes and no socks. She also had a jacket with a hood. The couple had a red pushchair.”

DAILY TELEGRAPH: “Madeleine McCann: First pictures of Dutch sighting suspects”

The Telegraph is now quoting the Mirror, and featuring the Mirror’s front page.

The sketches were drawn by a police artist for the Daily Mirror on the evidence of Anna Stam, 41, who claims to have seen the trio in Amsterdam.

DAILY STAR (front page): “MADDIE: hunts hits fever pitch”

THE COLUMNISTS:

THE INDEPENDENT: “Joan Smith: Everyone, it seems, has a theory about Madeleine”

The reason that a minority of cases catch the public imagination is not just to do with the family’s relationship with the media, although the McCanns have become as well known as the Lindberghs in the months since their daughter was spirited from Praia da Luz. As well as incarnating parents’ deepest fears, the disappearance (and reappearance) of children is a regular feature of myths and fairy stories, a fact which has clearly, if unconsciously, influenced the theories floated by newspapers.

Fairy stories? A child is missing. Yeah, a real one…

A persistent theme in coverage of the McCann case is the sighting of a flustered woman, dragging a reluctant toddler in her wake, who has taken Madeleine to fulfil her craving for a child; in this narrative, Madeleine functions as a changeling who might one day be reunited with her real family.

There once was a blonde duckling…

Then there are the strangers with evil intent, who prey on children and steal them for their own wicked purposes; two decades ago, they would have been on the look-out for children to use in Satanic rites, but now they come in the more up-to-date guise of paedophiles.

Paedos!

WESTERN MAIL: “Surely too much for the McCanns”

Writes middle-class Vicky Pollard, Lowri Turner:

If you were Kate or Gerry McCann, the revelation that Portuguese police knew of a possible sighting of Maddie in Holland just days after her disappearance, but didn’t tell them, you’d be beside yourself.

It’s hard to imagine, but…

That they concealed the fact that the little blonde girl in CCTV footage apparently told a shopkeeper she had been taken from her mummy on holiday is unbelievable.

DAILY MAIL: “Why were the senhors deaf to Kate’s cries of despair?”

Jan Moir writes:

Seven months after her daughter went missing, Kate McCann wrote a letter to the Portuguese detective leading the investigation into her disappearance.

Mrs McCann’s letter was a plea to be kept informed as to how the investigation was progressing, even if in only the ‘broadest terms’.

Just a hint! Give us a clue! Any news, senhor?

Those Portuguese. Grrr…

That was all she was asking, nothing more. Yet despite her careful sentences and softly, softly tone, a mother’s anguish hammers behind every single word.

I hope you do not mind me writing to you, she begins. Are you a parent? I am appealing to you as a fellow human being.

She uses words such as grateful, victim and torture to describe her situation.

Humane, blame and culture outline the ongoing situation.

Please, please help us is the unmistakable message. Yet despite her plangent pleas, that help was never forthcoming.

Kate McCann’s screams of despair were silent on the page, but the police chiefs still affected not to hear them…

I suppose we should be grateful that the wretches didn’t just bin it, along with any real hope of ever finding Madeleine McCann and the person or persons unknown who snatched her.

Their conduct throughout this entire investigation has been utterly shameful.

Has it?

From the start, the Cluedo cops were convinced that Mum and Dad had done it, in the bedroom, with a bottle of maxi-strength Calpol…

But Moir knows better. Moir is British…

Paedophiles see nothing immoral or wicked in what they do. They are organised and energetic, with an ability to hide in society and molest at will that is truly frightening.

So it was paedos. Now we know what the crime was..

Anorak

Posted: 8th, August 2008 | In: Broadsheets, Madeleine McCann, Tabloids Comments (406) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink