Madeleine McCann: Spotted In Italy And At The National Theatre

MADDIE WATCH – Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann - Waiting for the Amaral verdict, we learn of why the police investigated the McCanns and how hundreds of Maddies were spotted…

Daily Record: “Revealed: Portuguese police have ignored possible sightings of missing Madeleine McCann”

PORTUGUESE police have ignored dramatic new possible sightings of Madeleine McCann, it emerged yesterday.

Why are the possible sightings dramatic?

Details of them are included in a dossier, which includes photos of girls “shockingly similar” to the missing youngster.

In the Mirror, a sighting of a child becomes:

Maddy cops missed vital hunt clues

The most significant lead involved a series of reported sightings within a week in the same area of northern Italy.

Why are they the most significant? The Mirror does not say. The McCanns’ lawyer Isabel Duarte brings these pictures to the world’s attention. And adds:

“I’m angry because it is the police who should be doing this.”

Has she seen the full file? If so, has she shown it to the innocent McCanns, to see if they think one of the girls in the pictures os their daughter.

So far, Madeleine has also been seen in: Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Morocco, Majorca, Belgium, Bosnia, France, Australia, Brazil, Wales, Malta, Italy and Dorset.

“They were shocked at 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 facts:

The potential new leads date from July 2008 when the case was officially shelved by Portuguese police after they failed to find any evidence of the missing girl.

The Mail explains why:

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 Sun has more facts, and in “’Liar’ cop ignored hundreds of Maddie sightings”, tells readers:

COPS in Portugal ignored hundreds of “sightings” of Madeleine McCann – because they believed she was dead, it was claimed yesterday.

Inspector Ricardo Paiva also neglected to show her parents “shockingly similar” photos the public had sent in believing they were Maddie – or act on tip-offs.

Instead he put every bit in a dossier after writing on it: “Not relevant to the investigation”.

What else have we learnt from the case against Goncalo Amaral? The Yorkshire Post has news of the police advice to probe the McCanns:

The UK policing agency that advised Portuguese detectives to consider the possibility of the McCanns’ involvement in their daughter Madeleine’s disappearance said yesterday this was common practice.

The comments came after it emerged in a Lisbon court on Wednesday that the National Policing Improvement Agency recommended police investigate Gerry and Kate McCann.
The revelation was made by lawyers for former Portuguese detective Goncalo Amaral.
An agency spokesman said: “In disappearance cases it is common for the NPIA to advise investigating officers to consider the possibility of the involvement of family and close friends. This is good practice for investigating such cases.

“The NPIA gave similar generic advice to the Portuguese police in the Madeleine McCann case.”

And in case you were getting bored with the facts, here’s the fiction in the Indy:

Indeed, it could be argued that, in these days of beleaguered masculinity and kept house-husbands, you would get more moral mileage out of reverse-gender adaptations of plays such as A Doll’s House and, despite the problem of her pregnancy, Hedda Gabler. And, while I admire the script of Samuel Adamson’s Mrs Affleck (I was ill and did not see the show at the National Theatre) in its dissection of the 1950s, it makes too many distracting departures from the Ibsen play, Little Eyolf, on which it is based, to be in enough creative tension with it.

The original examines the marital aftermath of the death of a child who had previously been crippled from a fall sustained when his parents were making love. While respectfully registering all the acute differences in the two scenarios, I feel it fair to say that a modern Ibsen would be interested, as a subject, in the trials of the McCann family after the disappearance of their daughter Madeleine.

Madeleine McCann – an innocent child goes missing and the media feasts…

Anorak

Posted: 12th, February 2010 | In: Madeleine McCann Comments (10) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink