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Kate McCann has been in Madrid this
week to present the book "Madeleine”, based upon her diaries and in
which she exhaustively describes the police and personal efforts to
recover her daughter. On 3rd May 2007,
Maddie McCann aged four, disappeared whilst sleeping with her
twin siblings in a chalet in Praia da Luz, in the Algarve. Since then,
nothing has been heard about the girl.
The police had asked Kate McCann to try to
reconstruct in detail and in writing all her activities, meetings,
conversations, phone calls and visits, during the days previous to
Madeleine’s disappearance. Including the tiniest or most trivial detail.
They assured her that this memory exercise would help the investigators
follow the leads that might have appeared to her as having gone
unnoticed. Kate McCann was used, since her teenage years, to take up her
exercise book every day and write some impressions and details of her
life. In other words, she kept a diary. However, this was not told to
the Portuguese police. She waited for the arrival of the British
intelligence service to deliver this more intimate diary. When the
existence of this book came to light, the Portuguese police requested a
copy from the British. It was denied. A gesture that muddied even
further the already tense relations between the Portuguese and British
investigators who were collaborating in the search for the girl.
Goncalo Amaral had spent six years
heading the Portimao Criminal Investigation Department when he was put
in charge of the investigation. A few days before being taken off the
case "due to political pressure” according to his own words, Amaral
phoned me early in the morning in my Portimao hotel. It was the 12th
September 2007 and until then, the Portuguese officer had avoided any
contact with the press: "Justice is done in silence”, he quoted Saint
Jose to kindly evade any requests for interviews. The meeting took place
in a Brazilian owned cafeteria in Olhao. A dull and over lit place that
would remain open until dawn.
Amaral, who had charged the McCanns five
days previously, arrived late, unshaven, his suit wrinkled and with deep
shadows under his eyes. He said he had not slept for days. His shabby
appearance was one of the most recurrent arms used by the British press
to discredit him. In the UK defending the innocence of the McCann couple
had become a question of patriotism, the tabloids had gone to the
lengths of qualifying the Portuguese officer as a dipsomaniac, a bumpkin
and even as suspected of being involved in a paedophile network. They
did not pay any attention to Amaral who continued to insist on the
theory that Madeleine had suffered a domestic accident and that the
parents had disposed of her body to avoid scandal: according to Amaral’s
suspicions, the autopsy would have revealed that the McCanns had been
sedating their hyperactive daughter and that they had exceeded the
dosage. Gerry McCann, a doctor by profession, was at the point of being
named for an important position in the British health service when the
girl disappeared. A well-connected man with influence at the highest
levels.
Although the Portuguese police had not had
access to Kate McCann’s diaries, Amaral knew of part of their content
due to press leaks. According to these leaks, Kate admitted in her
writings that Maddie’s hyperactivity would on occasions, rile her. In
any case, Amaral also doubted the veracity of what Kate had written,
suggesting that the version of the diary delivered to the British
several weeks after the disappearance would have been later manipulated
to hide evidence: "If you take this book and write now that it is the
12th September and your impressions..., is that a diary or fiction?”.
The line of investigation opened by Amaral
and so dismissed by the British, is just a question of method: "Almost
90% of all missing children cases are the parents’ responsibility”, he
says, referring to police statistics. But, in this case, there were more
elements of suspicion.
Firstly, the McCanns did not call the
police immediately after the disappearance. They first organised,
together with the friends they were dining with that night, search
patrols around the resort. When they finally called the Portuguese
police, the McCann apartment had been infested by amateur investigators
contaminating the scene of the events and making it difficult to obtain
"clean” evidence. An unreasonable attitude from educated and affluent
persons. Any parent having the financial resources the McCanns had would
have immediately considered the possibility of a kidnapping with
economic motives.
Furthermore, the media circus organised by
the McCanns, implied to Amaral the immediate "condemning to death” of
the girl in the case that this was an abduction by a paedophile network.
The McCanns had clearly disregarded the recommendations for discretion
made to them by the Portuguese police.
After having been removed from the case, a
few days after our interview, Goncalo Amaral requested early retirement
and left behind 28 years of his profession in order to write the book
"Maddie. The Truth of the Lie”. In a few days more than 120.000 copies
were sold. In the book, Amaral claims that Gerry McCann hid his daughter
on the beach and, later, with the help of accomplices, froze her body
and disposed of it. Traces of blood appeared in the apartment and car
boot of the McCanns, but the police did not consider that there was
conclusive proof to accuse the parents. Before the book "Truth of the
Lie” was printed, PJ inspector Paulo Pereira Cristovao had already
written "The Star of Madeleine”, a book in which he relates the
investigation and maintains theories very similar to those defended by
Amaral. This book also had successful sales.
Now Kate McCann has just presented her
book "Madeleine” in Madrid with the aim of raising funds to continue
searching for her daughter. Both the Portuguese and British police have
abandoned the investigation. The McCanns however, have insisted during
these four years, contracting detectives who have followed false leads
even to India and offering a two million pound reward to anyone who
provides true information leading to Madeleine’s whereabouts. Kate
McCann’s book has also been distributed in the UK and Portugal. Although
"Madeleine” is partly based on them, it does not include the diaries
that were so zealously denied by the British police to Goncalo Amaral,
whom, no longer a member of the police, continues to request publicly
the re-opening of the case whenever he has the opportunity. |
