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New witnesses of the English
investigation to Madeleine McCann's
disappearance are going to be questioned
at the request of Scotland Yard (SY).
The fifth letter rogatory is already in
the hands of the Judiciary Police (PJ),
who will now have to schedule the
questionings.
The new Public Ministry prosecutor, to
whom the Maddie process was recently
attributed, authorized the questionings
and forwarded the letter to the South PJ
Directory, in Faro, so they can be
carried out. JN was able to establish
that there are about ten witnesses and
that all of them are going to be
questioned for the first time within the
scope of the English investigation. Some
of them are, however, already known to
the Portuguese investigation and they
had nothing relevant to say regarding
the English child who disappeared seven
years ago in Praia da Luz, in the
Algarve.
Even though the English police has
expressed their interest in questioning
again the four men constituted as
arguidos [formal suspects], that had
been questioned back in July, the
English ended up leaving them out of
this letter rogatory, which arrived to
the Public Ministry in August. These new
investigative steps should take place in
the very same manner as it happened
three months ago, with a notice for the
witnesses to appear at the PJ
headquarters. When the date is set,
Scotland Yard may then request to the
National PJ Directory to be present,
without being able to intervene, just as
before.
Last time they were in Portugal, on the
14th October, the English police
expressed their desire to make a new
letter rogatory (the sixth) requesting
for the re-analyses of the samples that
had been collected in the apartment from
where Madeleine disappeared, namely hair
samples and the
fabric belonging to a curtain.
In a meeting at the National Institute
of Forensic Medicine (INML), in Coimbra,
which gathered detectives and forensic
experts, Andy Redwood's team also spoke
about the possibility that some of the
samples could be taken to England and
analysed in a private lab. Until the end
of the afternoon, yesterday, no request
had been made in that sense to the
Public Ministry of Portimão, whose role
is to assess and decide on the letters
rogatory. |
