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Within 11 days, the British fighting
fund set up to help the former policeman
dubbed by UK media as the “Maddie Lie
Cop” has reached over €13,000.
The target - set by young psychology
student Leanne Baulch who was only 14 at
the time Madeleine McCann went missing -
is now less than €11,000 away, and
donations are coming in bit by bit every
few hours.
The extraordinary aspect of this latest
appeal is that it has been taken up by
so many and no matter what the size of
donations, people show their feelings
that Amaral has been “badly treated” for
reasons no-one appears able to fathom.
Indeed, the €500,000 damages set by
judge Emília Melo e Castro, plus the
further €106,000 in interest - all
destined to compensate the parents of
Madeleine for the distress Amaral’s book
The Truth of the Lie caused them - are
reported to be the highest ever awarded
against a Portuguese citizen.
With questions constantly appearing on
the fund website asking “what is being
covered up”, Brits are giving in droves,
with donors ranging from grandparents to
young people who were teenagers at the
time Madeleine went missing.
One of the most recent of the 819 givers
was grandmother Kathleen Conell who
deposited her £50 saying: “I worry about
your safety and only wish someone
wealthy with courage would adopt your
cause. The corruption in both the UK and
Portuguese establishments must be
stopped. Democracy is finished
otherwise.”
As this latest example of “people-power”
righting what they see is a wrong plays
out, the mainstream British media is
making much of the so-called string of
burglaries that appears to have taken
place on the resort from which Madeleine
went missing just over eight years ago.
Sunday Express writer James Murray has
written that British police “have
established a pattern of attacks on
children in the Algarve… which could
lead to a host of other sordid crimes
being solved”.
It’s a line that has surfaced every now
and then in this infinite mystery and
which many query, as if there truly had
been a spate of attacks on children in
the Algarve, the feeling is that local
and national media would have heard
about them.
As a source told us this week, what were
originally described as “five or six
cases, then morphed into over a dozen
and suddenly exploded into 30 cases or
so, if we are to believe the UK media”.
Meantime, the instigator of the British
appeal fund raising money for Amaral’s
appeal tells us she has been approached
by a number of UK newspapers, but none
of them are keen to write about her
effort until it reaches the €25,000
target. |
