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

DAILY STAR: “SECRET A-TEAM IN HUNT FOR MADDIE”

In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground.

Desperate Kate and Gerry McCann have forked out £500,000 on an “A-Team” of former top spooks to find missing daughter Madeleine.

Can the plan come together?

The couple now have “a global operation” of dozens of retired FBI, CIA and even MI5 agents dedicated to solving the mystery of her disappearance. The top secret team has been given six months to solve the riddle.

Pah! The A Team can do it in 40 minutes WITH ad breaks…

Says the McCanns’ spokesman – and still the McCanns’ spokesman – Clarence Mitchell:

“They have been on board for a few months and are on a six-month contract. For security reasons we can’t go into detail of the experts involved but it would not be wrong to say some are former military and police personnel with a degree of expertise.”

If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire… The A-Team.

THE GUARDIAN: “Diary: Esther Addley”

Our sympathies today are split, however, for we must also spare a small pang of pity for the security guard in Brussels who on Tuesday told the Sun about his sighting of a young girl who absolutely, definitely, without question was Madeleine McCann. “I saw her face and recognised that it was her,” said the man. “I would bet everything I own that it was her.”

It was our Maddie?

And sure enough, Belgian police later confirmed - dear reader, you are ahead of me - that it wasn’t. We can find nothing, as yet, on eBay, but Kate and Gerry McCann will be heartened that the man is without doubt now living under a cardboard box with only his own gnawed fists and his shame for sustenance.

The McCann case ruins lives..?

SPIKED: “‘Our Maddie’ makes a media comeback - The silly-season resurrection of the McCann tragedy shows that this was always a cynical, elite-scripted drama.”

Not that the absence of anything beyond hypothesis has inhibited the frontpage speculation. Indeed, the absence of hard evidence at the heart of the Maddie phenomenon has been its lifeblood. With nothing known beyond the barest of facts, anything, no matter how macabre, can be guessed at. And what better than a mail-order paedophile ring based, of course, in Belgium? In lieu of evidence, good old-fashioned prejudice will do. Indeed, over the past year, two pictures showing obviously Muslim women carrying or walking with a blonde-haired girl have been splashed under the headline: ‘IS THIS MADDIE?’ Well, Arab women with a European-looking child – it’s got to be dodgy.

Madeleine McCann: spinning news from a single thread

Posted: 14th, August 2008 | In: Broadsheets, Madeleine McCann, Tabloids. Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0