WE HELPED THE MCCANNS!

Part 1 of 10

[ Note: These purported messages, from 50 people who helped the McCanns in one way or another are interpretations, based on information in the public domain. Some of them include an element of irony and satire.  Where quotations are in inverted commas, these are actual quotes from the people concerned. Otherwise, their statements are not meant to be taken literally, though we believe they reflect realities – MMRG, December 2017 ]

                   

1. CLARENCE MITCHELL, former head government spin doctor

Hi! I’m Clarence Mitchell. I’ve been the McCanns’ paid public relations officer for over 10 years. They’ve paid me hundreds of thousands of pounds for that! So I’m very grateful to them. Before working for the McCanns, I was Tony Blair’s top media adviser, as Head of the Media Monitoring Unit. As I once told a Spanish newspaper, my role for Blair and for the McCanns was ‘to control what comes out in the media’. I’ve put hundreds of stories into the British media about the McCanns, but you’d never know it as the articles featuring these stories describe me as ‘a family pal’, ‘a source close to the family’, ‘a source close to the police’ and all sorts of similar descriptions. The chief Portuguese police federation representative, Carlos Anjos, once said of me: “He lies with as many teeth as he has in his mouth”. How unfair!

2.    KEVIN HALLIGEN, fraudster

"Hello there. I’m Kevin Halligen, but I have used lots of aliases in my life. I was also known as Richard Halligen when I worked on the McCann case.  I’m an Irishman, born in Dublin. From 2009 to 2013 I spent three years in Britain's top security prison, Belmarsh and a further year in a U.S. prison, because I was convicted of serious fraud in the U.S. (£1 million actually). I was pleased to help the McCanns because they paid me £500,000 plus expenses for just four months work. That was from April to August 2008, when the McCanns sacked me, because I achieved nothing for them. The money they paid me came from you – the generous British public, who thought that your money was going on a genuine search for Madeleine. So thank you all for that!  Before I worked for the McCanns, I was employed by the Dutch company, Trafigura, who killed scores of West Africans by dumping hundreds of tons of toxic waste near where people lived. Well, you’ve got to earn your living somehow, haven’t you? 

3.        NUNO LOURENCO, a Portuguese from the Algarve

Ola! I'm a Portuguese guy who played a big part in putting the Portuguese police off the scent in the days after Madeleine was reported missing. You see, Madeleine died on Sunday 29 April, four days before the McCanns reported her missing. I was part of the plan to make people think she really was abducted. Various people roped me in as part of their dastardly plot. The thing was, we had to invent a plausible ‘abductor’. Jane Tanner did her bit by claiming she saw a man carrying a young child near the McCanns’ apartment at 9.15pm on the night of Thursday 3 May.

My job was to ring up the Portuguese police the next day and pretend that I too had seen an abductor. With the help of my co-plotters, I was told to invent a story that a Polish holidaymaker, Wojchiech Krokowski, had tried to snatch my little daughter outside a cake shop in the remote village of Sagres. We agreed that we would say this happened on Sunday 29 April, I even took a photo of Krokowski’s hired car to add weight to my little tale. And of course, my description of him matched that of Jane Tanner perfectly…’cloth jacket and trousers’, ‘wearing classic shoes’, ‘didn’t look like a tourist’, same age height and build and so on. And guess what! Our plan worked! I ‘’phoned the Portuguese on the morning of Saturday 5 May. We fooled the head of the Portuguese detectives investigating the case, Goncalo Amaral, into calling Interpol and the German and Polish police. Krokowski’s plane back to Poland had to be grounded at Berlin Airport to see if Madeleine was on the plane or he knew anything about Madeleine. Ha! Ha!  Fooled ‘em good and proper! The police in every country will tell you that after any incident, the first 48 hours are the ‘Golden Period’ when vital evidence can be either gained, or lost. I threw one great big, gynormous spanner into the works, sending them looking in the wrong direction. Sweet!

4        HENRI EXTON, former top officer with MI5

Hello. I had a career in the security services, reaching the dizzy heights of Head of Covert Intelligence in MI5. But my career in MI5 ended when I was stopped at Manchester Airport walking out of a shop with a bottle of expensive perfume in my hand. I was spoken to by the police, admitted the offence, and accepted a police caution for theft. However, I then successfully got the police to remove my conviction form the records with my MI5 connections, y’know.

I was called in to help the McCanns by convicted fraudster Kevin Halligen and got instructions from him and Cheshire businessman Brian Kennedy.  Like him, I made a show of pretending to look for Madeleine. But my most important job was to produce two e-fits of a man supposedly seen by members of the Smith family from Drogheda, Ireland. How could the Smiths, one year after seeing a man for 2 or 3 seconds in the dark, and after saying they would never recognise him if they saw him again, manage to draw up any e-fit at all? And why did they produce two quite different images? Ludicrous, isn’t it? Well, all I can say is that these things are for me to know, and for you to find out!

5  GORDON BROWN, former Prime Minister

Hello everyone. I was Chancellor of the Exchequer when Madeleine was reported missing. It was none of my business to get involved in the case, since it was the Foreign Secretary’s job to assist British people overseas who were facing problems. But Gerry McCann kept ’phoning me on one of his mobiles, and as my brother was on an important nuclear energy committee (COMARE) with Gerry, I did my best to help the McCanns. I even persuaded the British government to get the Portuguese police to promote an alleged sighting of an abductor by the McCanns’ friend Jane Tanner, even though the Portuguese police never believed her fantastical abductor story. Later, when I became Prime Minister in July that year, I had discussions with Jose Socrates, the Prime Minister of Portugal (who was later involved in a corruption scandal). He agreed to get the Portuguese co-ordinator of the Madeleine investigation - Goncalo Amaral - off the case. He made sure that this happened, and on 2 October 2007, his officials rang me to tell me that Amaral was going to be removed from his post that very day. Job done! When I met Socrates at that important Lisbon conference later that month when we tried (and succeeded) in taking away even more of Britain’s sovereignty over its own affairs, I thanked him for his valuable help in making sure the Madeleine McCann case didn’t cause Britain too many problems. Pity about that referendum result. Let Nigel Farage be accursed!