What happened to Madeleine McCann? - No. 4 50 ridiculous stories the British media "ARE" telling you

PLEASE COPY THIS LEAFLET OR PASS IT TO OTHERS WHEN YOU’VE READ IT.  THANK YOU

This is our fourth leaflet in this series. The three previous ones featured facts about the reported disappearance of Madeleine McCann that the British media have not been telling you about. This leaflet is different.

While the British mainstream media have for years denied the British public the facts that might help us to better understand what happened to Madeleine, they have, at the same time, shamelessly produced many ridiculous, unbelievable stories about what might have happened to Madeleine, mainly to sell more newspapers and make more money. Some of these stories were even generated by the McCanns’ chief publicist, Clarence Mitchell, former Head of Tony Blair’s  Media Monitoring Unit. He once boasted that his job was ‘to control what comes out in the media’. Many stories featured in this leaflet could have harmed Madeleine, if she really had been abducted, was still alive and being held by an abductor. Suppose even one of these ‘sightings’ and ‘claims’ was true? What would be the effect on any abductor? What would he be likely to do? Many of the stories could have put Madeleine, if still alive, at great risk, by causing an abductor to take steps to evade the police.   

Our first leaflet examined the main facts of the case. You can watch a video of this leaflet on YouTube, in 4 parts, at this link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnXtYSeXSiw   Our second looked at the main members of the ‘McCann Team’, examining their activities, focusing on the controversial individuals (some of them criminals) and detective agencies they used - for what they said was their search for Madeleine. Our third leaflet discussed Operation Grange, the 6-year-long Metropolitan Police review and investigation into Madeleine’s reported disappearance. We have numbered our points from No. 151 onwards, this being a continuation of our first three leaflets.

British media stories about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann

We present below a selection of some of the most bizarre claimed ‘sightings’ and stories about Madeleine’s disappearance printed in the British media, some more ridiculous and unbelievable than others. A very useful website on the internet which gives further details about many of these stories is:

http://www.gerrymccannsblogs.co.uk/SIGHTINGS.htm  …and many of them are discussed in detail on this popular Madeleine McCann discussion forum: http://jillhavern.forumotion.net/

In 2017, the Sun published a list of 8,685 different ‘sightings’ of Madeleine.  The initial claim by the McCanns was that Madeleine had been abducted by a paedophile or a group of paedophiles. A bewildering variety of ‘sightings’, theories and claims about what really happened to Madeleine followed. We add comments on some of the stories, which we list in the approximate chronological order on which they were first published:

151. Madeleine seen in a taxi by Mr Cardosa on the day she was reported missing (3 May 2007) COMMENT: The taxi-driver claimed he had had a young blond-haired girl in his taxi, with two adults. But his story unravelled when he got muddled about which day this happened. He was dismissed as an attention-seeker.

152. Robert Murat’s girlfriend Michaela Walczuk handed Madeleine over to someone near the Spanish border (May 2007) COMMENT: This curious story emerged months after Madeleine had been reported missing. Moreover, when it did emerge, it was via the controversial, corrupt Spanish detective agency used by the McCanns, Metodo 3. On 13 November 2007, the man who ran the McCanns’ investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance, businessman Brian Kennedy, met with the Portuguese Police, bringing with him two Metodo 3 detectives (one of them, Antonio Giminez Raso, was arrested three months later and spent four years in prison on serious drugs and corruption charges). At the November 2007 meetings, the Metodo 3 detectives said they had been contacted by a truck driver who saw a blonde woman handing over ‘a package wrapped in a blanket’ to a man on a camp site near the border with Spain. The Portuguese Police followed this up, but it was another false lead.    

153. Maddie in a Dutch shop owned by Anna Stam (6 May 2007):  COMMENT:  This sighting was not made public for a full 15 months. It finally surfaced in the British media on 7 & 8 August 2008, after Anna Stam had flown to London to meet the McCann Team and help to draw up an artist’s sketch of the couple she said she’d seen with a young girl in her party shop in Amsterdam on Sunday 6 May 2007, three days after Madeleine had been reported missing. Ms Stam claimed the girl had spoken to her and said: “My name is Maddie. She is not my Mummy. They took me from my holiday”. Ms Stam did not report her sighting for a month. Dutch police interviewed her, drew up computer e-fits, and sent them to the Portuguese police on 18 June. The Portuguese police declined to follow up the information, besieged as they were by the intense work of their initial investigation and the presence of hundreds of international media journalists in Praia da Luz.  Ms Stam said: “I didn't like the man, he didn't look like a nice person…most people smile when they come in to buy things…he didn't smile back at me when I smiled at him. He had no sparkle in his eyes. He seemed angry”. She added: “The woman seemed stressed and uncomfortable. The man spoke in Portuguese. I know because I have Brazilian friends. The woman spoke in French while the little girl spoke English. It didn't seem like a real family”. The story was revived in August 2008 when the McCanns became aware that the Portuguese police had not travelled to Holland to follow up Ms Stam’s claims.  The McCanns’ PR spokesman Clarence Mitchell told the Mirror: “Anna did the right thing in contacting the Dutch police. But I find it shocking that the Portuguese police weren't even in touch, either with her or with us. I'm grateful to the Mirror for bringing her to us. Her evidence could be very significant. Our investigators will interview her in the next few days”.

154. Madeleine seen near a petrol station in Marrakesh, Morocco, asking to see ‘My Mummy’(9 May 2007) COMMENT:  A witness was sure she saw Madeleine with a man near a Marrekesh petrol station, next to the Hotel Ibis, on May 9, 2007. She said the girl ‘looked very distressed’ and said: “Can we go see Mummy now?’  The Daily Star revived this story as recently as 17 April 2017, as the 10th anniversary of Madeleine’s disappearance neared:  http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/606677/madeleine-mccann-sightings-maddie-2017-morocco

155. Madeleine seen asleep on a Belgian train (May 14, 2007)   COMMENT: A British man claimed he saw a child asleep on a train from Brussels to Antwerp and thought she looked drugged. The girl was with a balding, 6ft white man in his forties, who got off the train at Mechelen carrying her.

156.  Sightings in Geneva, Switzerland (16 May 2007)  COMMENT: A man reported seeing Madeleine in   Geneva on 16 May. In June, there were two separate sightings of a girl seen at Geneva Airport with a blonde woman in her 50s. Fifty police officers were called to search the entire terminal building, while all the pilots were asked to search their planes for the child:   http://www.pressreader.com/uk/daily-mail/20070623/281621005920288

157. Police looking for a red van with false number plates near Lisbon (17 May 2007) COMMENT: This story was reported by SKY News.

158. GCHQ hunt for Madeleine after they intercept messages in Arabic referring to "the little blonde girl" (29 May 2007) COMMENT:  Yes, even GCHQ in Cheltenham were involved in the search for Madeleine, in a story covered by Fox News on 29 May: “Brits Follow Cell Phone Signals in Hunt for Madeleine".

159. Three sightings in Belgium, two in Tongeren (May and June 2007): COMMENT: There were three more reported sightings in Belgium. The first was in May 2007 in Liège. Then, on 27 June, Jessica Beem said she had seen Madeleine in her flower-shop in Tongeren. A third claimed sighting, also in Tongeren, occurred on 28 July on a café terrace, where children’s therapist Katleen Sampermans said Madeleine was with a ‘strange-looking’ Dutch man and an Englishwoman. An artist’s sketch of the Dutchman was compiled. However, the girl turned out to be the 4-year-old daughter of a Belgian man. The Portuguese newspaper Correia da Manha in August 2008 reported that Interpol had received reports from 107 people that they had seen Madeleine. See here:

http://madeleinemccann.org/blog/2014/04/20/correio-da-manha-reports-august/ 

160. Two sightings in Zaio, Morocco (late May/early June 2007) COMMENT: A Spanish tourist said she saw a girl resembling Madeleine as she drove through the town of Zaio in northern Morocco at the end of May. Later, another Spanish tourist, Isabel Gonzalez, said she saw a girl fitting Madeleine’s description being ‘dragged across a street’, also in Zaio, by a North African woman on 15 June.

161. Madeleine seen in Hong Kong (14 June 14  2007)  COMMENT: A woman claimed that she had spotted  Madeleine in a Hong Kong shopping centre. The ‘sighting’ was ruled out after police studied CCTV footage

162. 28 sightings in Malta (17 to 29 June 2007)  COMMENT: There was a spate of alleged sightings of Madeleine in Malta, see e.g. here http://www.standard.co.uk/news/11-sightings-of-madeleine-in-malta-but-police-investigations-draw-a-blank-7237853.html  She was seen several times with a man, once with a woman. Another claimed to have seen her boarding a bus in the capital, Valetta. Elsewhere a Maltese man used his mobile ’phone to take a photo of a child he believed to be Madeleine at a parish festival in Zejtun on 17 June. A man from north Wales  said he saw a girl in the north-eastern town of Sliema wearing a jet black wig who was being told: "Get up, little girl”, by an Arab-looking man. Nothing came of any of these sightings: yet more police time wasted. 

163. Madeleine seen in Dubrovnik, Croatia (19 June 2007) COMMENT: She was allegedly seen in Dubrovnik, Croatia, laying on the floor ‘kicking and screaming’ and yelling: “I’m never going to see them again”.

164. Antonia Toscano, a Spanish journalist and professed ‘expert in Satanic cults’, said he knew Madeleine had been abducted by a French paedophile - on orders from wealthy organisers of a European child sex ring (27 June 2007)  COMMENT: A false claim by a man with a vivid imagination (see also No. 200).

165. Madeleine seen twice in Bosnia (8 July and 10 November 2007)  COMMENT: A British tourist believed he had seen Madeleine at the Roman Catholic shrine of Medjugorje. He said the little blonde girl he saw with a couple was ‘agitated and sobbing’. Police traced the girl, who was a local. In November, an Irishman visiting the same shrine contacted McCann detectives Metodo 3 to tell them he heard a little girl cry ‘I want my Daddy’ as she was driven away (10 November 2007).  This story was apparently backed up by a shop assistant. The Irishman had seen the car’s number plate, details of which were reported by the media before the police had chance to find the owner.    

166. Two women reported seeing a child who looked like Madeleine with a man at a petrol station near Cartagena, Spain (21 August 2007) COMMENT: This alleged sighting was thoroughly investigated by both the Spanish National Police and Civil Guard, using up hundreds of valuable police man-hours: Press Association, 23 August 2007, ‘Madeleine Spain sighting' probed’; also in the Guardian, 26 August 2007.

167. Madeleine was being carried on a peasant’s back in Morocco at Zinat near Tangier. The girl was actually Bushra Binhisa, the daughter of the woman who was carrying her (seen on 31 August, reported 20 September 2007)  COMMENT: This case received huge publicity in the British press, including the broadsheets, in September 2007. A European-looking girl of about Madeleine’s age was photographed as a Moroccan peasant woman carried her on her back. The girl’s face didn’t look like Madeleine at all, yet the British press ran banner headlines: ‘IS THIS MADELEINE?’ It turned out that this photo had first been seen by the McCanns, who passed it to the press. They must have known that it was not their daughter. Yet they let millions of British newspaper readers think that this might be Madeleine. Police and even journalists were sent out to Morocco and soon found the peasant family. The parents were shocked and distressed to have been accused of abducting Madeleine.         

168. Naoula Mahli claimed to have seen Madeleine in Fnideq, Morocco. Later, Lord Leveson was told at the Leveson enquiry into press standards that the Daily Express paid her £500 for her story (November 2007) COMMENT: This alleged sighting by Naoual Malhi occurred (she says) on 21 August 2007, but was not reported to the Spanish police until 6 days afterwards. Mrs Malhi claimed she was told by police that over 100 people had reported seeing Madeleine McCann in the same mountain area. She then reported her claims to Metodo 3 at the end of October. Naoual Malhi is a Moroccan doctor who lives in a British expatriate community near Malaga, Spain. She is divorced and at the time had a 4-year-old child. The blonde girl identified in the city of Fnideq as Madeleine McCann turned out to be a Moroccan child living with her parents, according to the director of the Moroccan Judicial Police. Naoula Mahli wove a superficially believable story about having discovered where Madeleine was being held. But her story didn’t stand up. Did she make it all up just to get £500 from the Daily Express?

  

169. Dunedin, New Zealand: Madeleine was seen in a supermarket in New Zealand with a man (5 December 2007) COMMENT: CCTV footage from New Zealand showed a girl like Madeleine being led into a supermarket by a portly man in shorts. The man’s behaviour aroused the suspicions of a female security guard in the Dunedin shop on South Island. She approached the girl who said her name was ‘Hailey’. But the security guard remained  convinced the girl was Madeleine and reported the matter to police. The CCTV footage of the man and girl was repeatedly shown on New Zealand TV, and in Britain. Interpol in Wellington was also called in to investigate. Of course, it was not Madeleine McCann but a young girl out shopping with her father. 

170. A man who looked like Beatle George Harrison may have abducted Madeleine (January 2008) COMMENT: This was a major front-page story on Sunday 30 January 2008 in the now-defunct News of the World. It was heavily prepared in advance by the McCann Team with the active help of Leicestershire Police. The entire story was woven by the McCann Team around a real individual who was often seen around Praia da Luz. One strange feature of the case concerned McCann friend Jane Tanner’s involvement in the story. She was the friend of the McCanns who claimed she had seen a man carrying a young blond child near the McCanns’ apartment at 9.15pm on the night she was reported missing. In all her descriptions of this man, she admitted that she never saw any part of his face. Brian Kennedy, head of the McCanns’ private investigation, had used a lady by the name of Melissa Little (said to be an F.B.I.-trained forensic artist) to draw a sketch of the man Jane Tanner said she had seen in May. In the sketch, released in October 2007, the man’s face was not seen. Later, in January 2008, Jane Tanner was shown the sketch of the man drawn to look like Beatle George Harrison. It was of his face, and he had a moustache. Despite never having seen the face of the man she said she had seen on 3 May, she now said she was ‘60 to 80% sure’ that ‘George Harrison man’ was the same man she’d seen in May! It emerged later that Jane Tanner had done an identification parade on 13 May 2007, when she said she was ‘adamant’ that Robert Murat was the man she had seen on 3 May. But the subsequent sketch she approved in October 2007 looked nothing like him. Hardly surprisingly, the Portuguese Police dismissed everything Jane Tanner said as wholly unreliable.        

171. Madeleine seen at a service station on the A9 motorway near Montpellier, France (21 February 2008) COMMENT: The claim that Madeleine had been seen in a service station on the A9 motorway in France was taken so seriously by the British press that even broadsheets devoted long articles to the alleged ‘sighting’. Even the Daily Telegraph’s respected Chief Reporter, Gordon Rayner, wrote an extensive piece on the subject, solemnly reported as follows: “Madeleine’s parents were facing further heartache today when it emerged that CCTV footage of a little girl playing in the south of France is ‘almost certainly not her’. Hopes of finding the missing four-year-old were raised when a Dutch student said she spotted the child at a service station close to the city of Montpellier last Friday. Melissa Firing, 18, said the child was with a ‘tall, swarthy’ man who bundled her away in a car. French detectives spent ‘hours’ examining the footage at the nation’s Criminal Research Institute in Rosny-sur-Bois, near  Paris. Police even tracked down the owner of the car in which the little girl was driven away, after the number plate appeared on the video footage. A ‘source close to the McCanns’ said: “The owner has provided a plausible explanation of what he was doing with a young child in a motorway service station”. French police at the time said they were also investigating allegations that young children, including babies, were being ‘sold’ at impromptu auctions in car parks along the Mediterranean coast. 

172. A Portuguese couple with Madeleine in tow knocked at the door of a retired civil servant in Dorset (25 February 2008)  COMMENT: Reported in the Daily Telegraph, 24 February 2008.  This is believed to be the first reported sighting of Madeleine in Britain. It occurred in Dorset, where civil servant Alan Cameron had retired. He told police that Madeleine was with a Portuguese couple who came to the door. Yet another false claim.

173. Madeleine seen on a plane to Brazil, one of six ‘sightings’ in that country (14 May 2008)  COMMENT: A traveller claimed to have seen Madeleine travelling on a plane to Brazil. Interpol’s chief Jorge Pontes said: “This sighting is still under investigation so we cannot reveal details. We have a witness insisting they saw the child on a flight to Sao Paulo”. Clarence Mitchell, the McCanns’ PR spokesman, said: “The couple’s privately hired detective agency, Metodo 3, are looking into the latest claim”. There had been five other ‘sightings’ in Brazil, one in Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian police chief Marilia Moreira Marques said that a man called Mark claimed to have seen Madeleine at a book fair in Cinelandia Square, Rio de Janeiro, on 11 May 2007. The sighting had been reported to a foreign embassy in the capital, and was referred to Interpol, who were said to hold a ‘40-page dossier’ on Madeleine.  On 7 June, a man said he spotted Madeleine in an Ipanema cafe sitting with a man. He said she looked ‘sad’ and was not speaking to her male companion. See:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/madeleinemccann/1954397/Madeleine-McCann-spotted-on-plane-to-Brazil.html

174. Madeleine spotted on a Venezuelan island (18 May 2008)  COMMENT: A British businessman and yacht skipper, Trevor Francis, said he saw Madeleine in the company of two or three women on the island of Margarita in Venezuela. He claimed this happened several weeks previously, but says he didn’t approach her because he was ‘too fearful of causing a spectacle’: “I wanted to grab her and shout out her name and see what reaction I would get," he told the News of the World. Mr Francis claimed he noticed an identical eye blemish to that of Madeleine.   

See also:  http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/sailor-maddie-mccann-article-1.316136

175. Croatian national footballer’s two-year-old son mistaken for Madeleine (18 August 2008) COMMENT:  Two British tourists spotted a woman leading what they thought was a young girl with long blonde hair along a beach on the Croatian holiday island of Krk. They both immediately thought it was Madeleine McCann. They secretly took photographs of the child. The British woman seized a chance to grab the child’s arm, intending to take her to the police. Only then did she realise that the child was not Madeleine as it was a boy. The boy’s mother turned out to be well-known Croatian model Nives Drpic, while the father was a footballer for the Croatian national team and for Dinamo Zagreb. They were described as the ‘Posh & Becks’ of Croatia. See: http://www.gossiprocks.com/forum/news/79834-british-couple-tried-rescue-madeleine-mccann-lookalike-little-croatian-boy.html  and  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1046405/British-couple-tried-rescue-Maddy-lookalike--Croatian-football-star-model-wife.html

176. Madeleine seen in Algeria with a suspicious-looking family (September 2008) COMMENT: A man said he had seen a Madeleine look-alike blonde girl, with a British accent, with an Algerian family who were ‘acting suspiciously’.

177. Maddie seen in the company of a big, fat gypsy woman (September 2008)  COMMENT:  A British woman, Mrs Jean Godwin, aged 56, from Widnes, Cheshire, was sure she had spotted Madeleine McCann in the company of two fat women at Carvoeiro, about 30 miles from Praia da Luz, and rang the McCanns’ ‘investigation hotline’. Mrs Godwin described a ‘gaunt, very thin, malnourished’ young blonde girl wearing a black, shiny wig being dragged by ‘gipsy women’. One of the women, she said, was an ‘obese’ size 30, in her mid-to-late 40s, with ‘dirty and unkempt’ red hair. She added: “The girl’s eyes were wide open and my attention was drawn to the large irises. I am 100% sure it was Madeleine”.  This sighting, said the McCann Team’s investigators, matched an earlier account of a fat, red-haired woman, now known to be Yvone Albino, a cleaner, who had been seen by another British tourist, Jeni Weinberger, from Salisbury, Wilshire, acting suspiciously outside the McCanns’ apartment on 3 May 2007, the day Madeleine McCann was reported missing.  The McCanns’ investigators traced her -  she has two grown up sons but no young children - and followed her to a small, run-down farmhouse on an orange grove, near Silves, not far from Praia da Luz. They then began a surveillance operation at the farmhouse, fearing that Madeleine was being held prisoner there. In the following months, Yvone Albino paid several visits to the property, a holiday home owned by a teacher and his partner, whom the investigators deemed to be ‘suspicious’. Their concerns were raised when they discovered a white Citroen Berlingo with a child’s doll on the back seat and a child’s drawing among rubbish bags - even though the couple did not have young children. Mrs Albino, who has two grown-up sons but no young children, used to visit teacher Jorge Martins and his partner Maria Silveira (traced through their car), at their run-down farmhouse in an orange grove. Portuguese police confronted Mrs Albino, who said she knew nothing about either sighting and denied any contact with young children. Officers found the house deserted. The woman with Mrs Albino in Carvoeiro was never identified. Mr Martins and Miss Silveira have never been accused of any crime by police. He told police the doll was given to him by his students several years earlier. Nothing came of all this effort, but it made it look as though the McCann Team were doing a real investigation.                         See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/madeleinemccann/7364631/McCanns-detective-searching-for-girl-in-a-wig-seen-with-two-gipsies.html

178.  Madeleine spotted in Majorca by British tourist (28 September 2008): COMMENT:  Two British  holidaymakers were convinced that they saw Madeleine on a beach at Cala d'Or, Majorca. She was reportedly ‘in the company of two women’, but they also added: “We saw the girl was on her own under a parasol on the beach with a colouring book, which struck us as odd…later in the week we saw the girl again and the woman was trying to drag them down to the beach, although it was dark, which she again found odd”. Spanish police combed dozens of hotels and holiday apartments to try to locate the girl. One police spokesman said: “We are aware of the numerous previous sightings all over the world that have turned out to be false and it could well be that the couple have made an honest mistake”.  See here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/madeleinemccann/3086959/Police-investigate-claimed-Madeleine-McCann-sighting-in-Majorca.html  …and in the Daily Mail

179. Madeleine seen with a Portuguese child trafficker in the United States (9 October 2008) COMMENT:     On October 9, 2008 it was reported that Madeleine was living with a Portuguese man in the U.S. He allegedly was a child trafficker, smuggling children from his homeland, Mexico and Greece.

180. Madeleine asked for a chocolate ice-cream from an ice-cream seller whilst with a French family in Brussels (October 2008)  COMMENT: A North African-looking woman with a young girl in tow was picked up on CCTV footage by a security guard at a branch of the Belgian bank KBC. Later, an ice cream vendor, Antonio Migliardi, came forward, describing the woman as being ‘very severe’ with the child, adding: “She held her hand firmly and kept pulling her closer. When I gave the ice cream to the child she stood frozen. The lady took it in her place. Normally a happy child always takes the ice. This was not a normal situation”.  The security guard said: “I will bet everything I own that the child I saw was Madeleine McCann”. Clarence Mitchell, the McCanns’ spokesman, commented: “We take this information seriously”.  See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/madeleinemccann/2544450/Madeleine-McCann-seen-again-in-Brussels.html

181. Maddie seen in a Spanish restaurant in Maryland, U.S.A. (May 2009) COMMENT: An unnamed woman spoke to the Sun newspaper in June 2013, saying she thought she saw Madeleine in a Spanish restaurant in Montgomery County, Maryland, accompanied by a blonde woman and two men, one of whom was ‘scruffy-looking with a foreign accent’. She added: “I’ve never felt so strongly about something”. She said that Operation Grange was now following up the alleged ‘sighting’.

182. Madeleine was abducted by British paedophile Raymond Hewlett (2009 and 2010)  COMMENT: This was a long-running story in 2009 and 2010. Raymond Hewlett was a convicted British paedophile who had been travelling around Europe in 2007, when Madeleine was reported missing. Another traveller, Peter Verran, had met with Raymond Hewlett in June 2007 in Morocco. The two men discussed Madeleine McCann, and Hewlett admitted that he had been staying about 30 miles away from Praia da Luz at the time Madeleine went missing. He also said he knew of the apartment block where the McCann family had been staying in May 2007. Hewlett denied he had been in Praia da Luz that week and there was no evidence that he was. Yet the McCann Team kept the story of Hewlett being a suspect going for months. They made repeated attempts to interview him, having located him at a hospital in Aachen, Germany, where he was being treated in hospital (see also below).     

183. Madeleine was taken on a yacht to Australia by an Australian woman who looked like Victoria Beckham and wanted ‘a new daughter’ (6 August 2009) This was another major news story promoted by the McCanns. Their PR spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, held a news conference where he paraded a sketch of what the woman looked like. He said she looked like Victoria Beckham (‘Posh Spice’). The whole story was said to have come from a British man, said variously to have been a ‘businessman’ or ‘banker’. The McCanns didn’t give the man’s name, so his story couldn’t be checked. It was claimed that the man told the McCann Team that on Sunday 6 May 2007, he had been drinking all evening in some of the numerous bars around Barcelona docks. He said that at 2am that night, a young woman with an Australian accent came up to him and asked: ‘Have you got my new daughter?’ He said ‘No’, and the young woman went away. Despite Madeleine’s disappearance being front-page news around the world at the time, he had delayed reporting this incident for over two years, claiming he had ‘agonised’ all that time over whether or not to report it. It was claimed that Madeleine may have been taken by boat from Praia da Luz to Barcelona (a journey of hundreds of miles), and that the woman with an Australian accent had arranged to ‘buy’ her at Barcelona docks three days later and board a large yacht bound for Australia which was leaving the next day. Amazingly, the British press once again fell for this most unlikely story. It made the top story  on TV and mainstream British newspaper bulletins. It caused an extensive police search for the woman in Australia. A month after this story, the Mail on Sunday exposed the fact that the McCanns’ detectives who had researched this story had neglected to contact any of relevant Barcelona agencies, such as the police and the port authority, and had failed to do the most basic of checks with owners of pubs around the port.  On 9 August, a  Sydney Morning Herald article: ‘Madness in the search for Maddie’, reported that, following the McCanns’dramatic press conference, the search for Madeleine ‘swept across at least four Australian states’, with ‘a string of sightings’ by people who said they had seen a woman looking like ‘Posh Spice’ A 53-year-old Australian woman, Judith Aron, was ‘forced to deny’ that she had abducted Madeleine. She had a fair-haired five-year-old daughter. It was thought that a neighbour had reported her because she ‘spoke Spanish’. Also, an elderly Sydney woman went into Burwood police station claiming that a friend she had met in Spain, and travelled with in Portugal, was the woman in the identikit picture. She was later identified as Nelida Martinez and was soon ruled out. The McCanns said they had received over 600 e-mails after issuing the ‘Posh Spice lookalike’ appeal, mostly from Australia. See: http://www.smh.com.au/national/madness-in-search-for-maddie-20090808-edj3.html ...and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/madeleinemccann/5981579/Madeleine-McCanns-parents-to-trace-Victoria-Beckham-lookalike.html

184. Madeleine seen with man at petrol station in Devon - arrested (4 September 2009)   COMMENT: A fire protection officer, Jon Hazlehurst  was questioned over Madeleine McCann after being spotted in a petrol station with his step-daughter, Lauren, aged eight (Madeleine would have been six at that time). The man was traced by police, visited by police, driven to Kingsbridge police station and taken into custody. The witness had noted down Mr Hazelhurst's car registration plate and contacted the police. Mr Hazlehurst said: “I was surprised more than anything. I thought it was…a prank, before I realised that they were quite serious. The police were very polite and I understood that they had to follow up the lead, even if it didn't come to anything”. See:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/madeleinemccann/6137830/Man-questioned-over-Madeleine-McCann-lookalike-step-daughter.html

185. Madeleine is alive but being kept in an underground lair within a few miles of Praia da Luz (September 2009)  COMMENT: In 2009, the world heard the extraordinary story of Natasha Kampusch, from Austria - the young girl kept captive for years by a paedophile, until she escaped from his clutches at the age of 18. A similar story of a paedophile keeping his victims locked up involved Fritzl from Germany. Later, Jaycee Lee Dugard, who had been abducted by a paedophile from a bus stop in the U.S. at the age of 11, was found alive and rescued at the age of 29. When these stories began to receive publicity, the McCann Team quickly capitalised on them. Their lead detective at the time, Dave Edgar, exploited these news stories in the Belfast Telegraph and the Independent, stating that his new theory was that Madeleine was likewise being held in an ‘underground lair’ within a few miles of Praia da Luz. This was purely for the press - in order to maintain public perception that Madeleine had really been abducted. Whilst professing that they believed that Madeleine could be hidden near Praia da Luz, the McCann Team made no effort whatsoever to initiate any official or unofficial search for such a lair.

186. Madeleine seen in a Swedish photograph (10 October 2009) COMMENT: This story was first brought to the British public by Antonella Lazzeri of the Sun, which has produced many of the most absurd stories about  alleged Madeleine ‘sightings’. A girl was photographed in Sweden, with claims that ‘after computer-matching’, she could be Madeleine. She was seen at a car show, and was said to have an ‘identical jawline’ and ‘eyes the same colour as Madeleine’. The photo appeared on a website, after which Swedish police were ‘inundated’ with calls from the public, some of them saying they had seen Madeleine at the car show, where she was heard to speak in English. ‘Face-mapping technology’ used by British police was said to have identified the girl as a possible match. Madeleine’s parents Kate asked for ‘an urgent investigation’. The McCanns’ official spokesman Clarence Mitchell said: "Kate and Gerry are liaising with the relevant authorities”. This excellent website carries this Swedish story:

http://www.gerrymccannsblogs.co.uk/press/30OCT9/SUN_10_10_09.htm 

187. Madeleine was seen on TV at a school concert in Canada (5 March 2010) COMMENT: The continued appearance of Madeleine McCann’s appealing photograph in newspapers around the world led to an extraordinary incident in Canada. Distressed viewers inundated a Canadian TV station with calls after a blonde girl looking identical to Madeleine was shown singing with a school choir on a news show. The Canadian police had to contact the school and carry out checks to make sure the girl was not Madeleine.  See: http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/124974/MADDIE-SEEN-ALIVE-ON-TV

188. Madeleine was seen in Dubai (20 January 2011)  COMMENT: Madeleine was reported to have been in a Dubai shopping centre. By this time, she would have been nearly eight years old. The sighting was by ‘an unnamed 35-year-old businessman’. The man with Madeleine was said to be ‘very skinny’ with a moustache and a ‘scary appearance’ – and some commented that he looked very similar to a previous artist’s sketch of a possible suspect [see sighting No. 170, above]. He was accompanied by two women, one of whom was black and wore a veil and the other who was ‘also very thin’, according to the Sun.  See also:   http://metro.co.uk/2011/01/20/madeleine-mccann-seen-in-dubai-630478

189. Madeleine was abducted by vicious paedophiles who took her to the United States, according to  a basketball-playing Angolan amateur sleuth whose front teeth were knocked out by the paedophiles (18 February 2011)  COMMENT: The Sun headed this story: ‘Madeleine McCann is in America - and I know who took her’. This story, once again strongly promoted by the McCann Team, was based on the outrageous and completely unbelievable claims of Marcelinho Italiano, a 6’ 4”, an Angolan-born ‘amateur detective’. He claimed that in the course of his sleuthing in Portugal, he had contacted a group of vicious paedophiles. This brutal group - who, he said, had knocked out two of his teeth in the course of his sleuthing - had supposedly spirited Madeleine away to the U.S., where they were holding her. Italiano claimed he had to flee Portugal and had gone to ground in  Spain in fear for his life. However, when the story broke, a search on the internet soon located him. His name came up as a regular member of a team playing in a Spanish basketball league. Once again, nothing came of this story, which appeared to have been manufactured by the Sun with the help of ex-pat Olive Press editor, Jon Clarke.

See:  https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/379292/madeleine-mccann-is-in-america-and-i-know-who-took-her/

190. Madeleine was seen in India (29 June 2011):  COMMENT: The alleged sighting of Madeleine was made by a British woman on holiday in Jammu & Kashmir, in the northern Indian Himalayas. She raised concerns with other tourists, one of whom, an American, was so sure the girl was Madeleine that he tried to snatch her from the couple she was with. The parents, a French woman and her Belgian husband, were spoken to by the police who insisted they produced their passports. A spokesman for Leh police told the Chandigarh Tribune: “It all depends now on the evidence like DNA for which we need help from Madeleine's parents and the British police”. The McCanns’ PR spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, said: “We remain grateful for people's vigilance around the world. Madeleine is still out there and the search for her very much continues”. This was another Sun story, also reported in the Daily Mail:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2019698/Madeleine-McCann-Hopes-dashed-sighting-India.html#ixzz4mXTqmWYV

191. A drunk gypsy told British paedophile Raymond Hewlett that he organised Madeleine’s abduction; Hewlett then wrote a letter on his death-bed to his long-estranged son Wayne, who promptly burnt the letter and then told the Sun all about it (1 September 2011)  COMMENT: Many rate this as the most preposterous story of them all. Raymond Hewlett (see sighting No. 182 above) died in December 2010. He had been estranged from his son Wayne for more than 20 years, because his son had turned against him after learning of his sexual abuse of young children. The story Wayne told to the McCann Team and to the Sun was a strange one. He claimed that a ‘mystery man’ had travelled from Germany with a letter his father had written to him on his death-bed. In this letter, Wayne said, his father explained how he had got to know the leader of a criminal gypsy gang. One evening, they had both had a lot to drink, and the gypsy gang leader had confessed that he and his gang had abducted Madeleine and handed her to a wealthy North African family for money. In the letter, he identified the gypsy gang leader by name. Wayne said he had been upset by the letter and burnt it. However, having burnt it, he apparently then approached either the McCann Team, or the Sun directly, with his story. He could not now remember the name of the gang leader. Despite the obvious unsoundness of the story and the fact that Wayne could not remember even the name of the alleged gypsy gang leader, the Sun put this ridiculous story on their front page - and reported that the British police were taking his information seriously.  Nothing ever came of it.     

192. Madeleine was abducted to Brazil (31 August 2012) COMMENT: Pictures appeared in several newspapers of a young white girl who looked vaguely like Madeleine, in a crowd of people leaving a plane in Brazil. Who developed this story is not clear. But an alert Madeleine McCann researcher, known on the internet as ‘Reggie Dunlop,’ matched the photo of the crowd leaving the plane with a photograph of people seen leaving a plane in Ibiza, several years previously. The photo had been ‘reversed’ (left-to-right) in the newspaper pictures. Whoever developed this story for the press was engaged in a very deliberate deception of the press and the public. 

193. Madeleine was seen in a car leaving a campsite with a Swiss family (9 May 2012) COMMENT: See:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2141774/Madeleine-McCann-sighting-Swiss-father-says-mystery-man-seen-driving-blonde-girl.html

194. Rose Johnson saw Madeleine playing on Penoncillo beach, Spain (3 May 2012)  COMMENT: This was yet one more absurd story reported by the ever-dutiful Jon Clarke, Olive Press Editor. He reported in May 2012 that an ex-pat pensioner, Rose Johnson, believed she had seen ‘eight-year-old Maddie’ playing outside Merendero restaurant on Penoncillo beach, between Nerja and Torrox, the previous summer (2011). She had said: “We were quite taken aback…this Maddie look-a-like walked off the beach and joined a table of what we would describe as a party of Spanish people or similar. They were completely different to her. The whole family was dark skinned, whereas she had fair hair and pale skin and obviously was northern European. It was very, very strange. She was about eight and seemed really airy-fairy, in a world of her own”. Clarke also claimed that Portuguese police, just a fortnight previously, had asked their Spanish counterparts to investigate other sightings in Nerja, and that Rose Johnson had only spoken after reading an Olive Press article. A lady called Karen commented in the Olive Press article, claiming she had seen Madeleine on 6 May 2007 (three days after she was reported missing) “with a family in Cabopino Campsite, near Marbellam who had a dark blue people carrier. Clarke responded: “Hi Karen, we would love to talk to you about this…we have now had at least half a dozen very good ‘sightings’ of Maddie on the Costa del Sol…I really hope somebody can produce the killer fact! Give our newsdesk a call”.  See:

http://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2012/05/03/i-saw-maddie-at-costa-del-sol-beach-restaurant/penoncillo-beach-looking-towards-nerja-where-rose-johnson-saw-madeleine-mccann-playing-2/

195. Madeleine spotted in Queenstown, New Zealand on New Year’s Eve, 2012   COMMENT:  A girl was spotted in Queenstown on New Year’s Eve by a retailer. A police investigation began, which discovered that the girl had once previously been identified as Madeleine McCann. See:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/8141833/Report-revives-hunt-for-British-girl

 

196. New Zealand school pupil ‘frequently mistaken for Madeleine’ given DNA test (7 February 2013) COMMENT: A New Zealand schoolgirl repeatedly mistaken for missing Madeleine McCann had to give police a DNA sample so that Scotland Yard could confirm that she is not the youngster. Several New Zealanders had thought she was missing Madeleine McCann, who was said to have a mark on her right eye similar to the distinctive one on the British girl's iris.                                See:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2274826/Madeleine-McCann-New-Zealand-girl-DNA-sample-prove-missing-Maddie.html#ixzz4mq6RAjwd

197. Madeleine may have been snatched by six people seen in a white van (2014) COMMENT: This was a story possibly leaked by Scotland Yard’s investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann - Operation Grange. It was claimed that Scotland Yard detectives were trying to trace six people, thought to be British, who had used a white van in Praia da Luz at the time the McCanns were in Praia da Luz. There was nothing about it in the Portuguese Police files, and no more has been heard about this since. But, again, it made for a good headline.  

198. Skeltal remains of a fair-haired young girl, found in a suitcase in Australia, ‘could be Madeleine’ (26 July, 2015)  COMMENT: A suitcase containing the skeletal remains of a fair-haired young girl was discovered near a motorway in Wynarka, near Adelaide. Pathologists said she would have died in 2007. There was speculation that the body was Madeleine’s after a police spokesman said that the remains did not match descriptions of any missing children in Australia. But after forensic examination, the DNA did not match Madeleine’s,

199. Former Scotland Yard detective Colin Sutton says that ‘Madeleine was stolen to order for a wealthy North African family who wanted a white child’ (April 2017)  COMMENT: This story appeared just two weeks before the 10th anniversary of Madeleine being reported missing, as the British media geared up for another frenzy of anniversary articles. According to the Press Association, former Met Police Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton, who had been to Praia da Luz several times for various newspapers, the most likely hypothesis for what happened to Madeleine McCann was that she had been “stolen to order by slave traders or people traffickers and smuggled into Africa for a rich family who wanted a white child”. A Daily Mirror article claimed that “Gangs are thought to sell children to rich Middle Eastern families while operating out of Mauritania, West Africa”.

200. False claims made by ‘psychics’ and mediums   It is estimated that thousands of assorted mediums, psychics, dream interpreters and others, who claimed knowledge of what happened to Madeleine, contacted the police or the McCanns with their ideas, impressions and theories. Mostly these were vague, e.g. “I see a white cottage on a hillside” or “I see a boat on the sea”. Tens of thousands of valuable police hours were wasted investigating this nonsense. These  mediums and mystics just relied  on their vague impressions and ideas, because no two of them were ever the same.  .        

If you’ve found this leaflet of interest, please pass it on to those you know  >>>   thank you

Published by ‘The Madeleine McCann Research Group’, 14 July 2017.   Further reading/watching:

Recommended discussion forum   >>>   http://jillhavern.forumotion.net/      

Recommended internet library       >>>   www.gerrymccannsblogs.co.uk

Watch the Portuguese detective’s documentary:    www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxGhlYTNisw

Watch Richard Hall’s five Madeleine McCann films  >>  

1. True Story of Madeleine McCann ---- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIjPcvmVzUo

2. The Phantoms ------------------------------- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL0-ePd3FCU

3. When Madeleine Died? ------------------- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70oo2-Sj7to949

4. McCanns’ Embedded Confessions ----- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slziMpXYjJo&t=59s

5. Madeleine: Why The Cover-Up? ------- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQgmtrOeDLM

Reasons why the public need a report on Operation Grange: The letter handed in to Prime Minister, David Cameron, on 29 April 2016 in support of the petition

Tel: 01279 635789                                                       66 Chippingfield

e-mail: ajsbennett@btinternet.com                                HARLOW

                                                                                      Essex

                                                                                        CM17 0DH

                                                                                     Friday 29 April 2016

Rt Hon David Cameron MP

Prime Minster

10 Downing Street

LONDON

SW1A  2AA

BY HAND

Dear Mr Cameron

re: Petition on the Prime Minister’s website to order the Home Secretary to publish a report on the Madeleine McCann Enquiry [Operation Grange]

First of all thank you for continuing the previous practice of allowing people to submit petitions via the Downing Street Petition site, and also for facilitating my being able to deliver the petition results in person to you today.

The petition attracted 3,111 signatures. Its preamble states: “Enquiries by British (and Portuguese) police forces have cost around £15 million in 8 years. The public is now entitled to a full report on how that has been spent. The report should cover the role of the government, the security services & UK police forces”.

I appreciate that only those petitions that attract 10,000 or more signatories are entitled to a government reply. I am also aware that the police do not normally issue reports on their investigations.  However, in view of (a) the totally unprecedented media coverage the Madeleine McCann case has had for the past nine years, (b) the degree of concern that has regularly been expressed in many quarters about the way this operation was initially set up, (c) the way it has since been conducted, (d) the length of time of the operation – 5 years, and (e) its cost, estimated at around  £14 million so far, I trust you will feel able, on this occasion, to respond to the concerns expressed by many thousands of people - and of course the 3,111 who have signed the petition.  

The highly unusual way the initial review was set up, the reasons for it, the very unusual remit, and the later setting-up of what amounted to an active police investigation on foreign soil are all factors that make this police investigation unprecedented.

Added to that, many of the public have repeatedly expressed why this particular missing child case has been singled out, why it has taken so long with no apparent prospect of success, and its £14 million cost. That cost, moreover, excludes the costs of: (1) the Portuguese Police operation, (2) the Leicestershire Police investigation, and (3) the controversial private investigations carried out by the McCanns, their benefactor, Cheshire-based businessman Brian Kennedy, and the Directors of the Find Madeleine Fund.

I now set out some of the main areas of concern on which, we suggest, the public is entitled to persuasive and honest answers:     

A.   The setting up of the initial Review, 12 May 2011

For two years, the McCanns had been unsuccessfully lobbying two successive Home Secretaries (Alan Johnson, and then Theresa May) to secure a Review. Then Kate McCann decided to publish a book on 11 May 2011, which the Sun newspaper began serialising three weeks beforehand. On 11 May, the Sun published a letter from the McCanns, direct to yourself, appealing for you to order a Review. The very next day you did order a Review.

Subsequently it emerged from credible sources ‘close to No. 10’, and widely publicised on the BBC and other news networks, that you had been badgered into setting up the Review by Rebekah Brooks, the Chief Executive Officer of News International, which owns the Sun. There were credible reports that she had threatened you with ‘a week of bad headlines about Theresa May’ if you did not accede to her request.

These issues were publicly aired by Lord Leveson at the lengthy public enquiry  held into press regulation. Rebekah Brooks was asked a direct question by Lord Leveson as to whether she had ‘threatened’ the Prime Minister in order for the McCanns to secure the Review they had been seeking. She said ‘No’. Lord Leveson then asked her ‘What word would you use, then?’ She smiled, winked and said ‘Persuaded’. It is clear therefore that, whatever words were spoken to you by Rebekah Brooks, she persuaded you to completely reverse decisions made by successive Home Secretaries over the past two years who, in their political and professional judgment, did not agree that there was a persuasive case for a review.

Any report to the public should investigate what Rebekah Brooks did say to you that caused you to order this Review.

Further, it was announced on the very same day (12 May) that the Home Secretary had agreed to establish a Review and had appointed Sir Paul Stephenson, then head of the Metropolitan Police (Met), to set it up. It is unlikely that all of that was done during the 24 hours between the Sun publishing the McCanns’ letter and your announcement of a Review. Any public report should explain how and when your decision was arrived at and whether, in fact, the McCanns’ letter in the Sun was a pre-planned move to enable you to announce the Review the following day.

B.   The appointment of Detective Superintendent (DCS) Hamish Campbell as the Senior Investigating Officer (SIO) and the person who would decide the remit of the Review                          

A decision was taken, presumably by the then Head of the Met, Sir Paul Stephenson, to appoint DCS Hamish Campbell as the SIO in the case. He decided the remit of any review or investigation, which has proved controversial.

As any internet search reveals, DCS Campbell is best known for his actions in the case of the prosecution of an innocent man, Barry George/Bulsara, for the cold-blooded murder of TV presenter, Jill Dando, a murder that remains  unsolved to this day. He was the Investigating Officer. On evidence which he helped to assemble, Barry George/Bulsara was wrongly convicted of Jill Dando’s murder and served eight years in jail for a crime he did not commit. At the subsequent Court of Appeal hearing which led to the release of George/Bulsara, the judges suggested that there were strong indications that a trace of firearms residue which matched the known murder weapon of Jill Dando may have been deliberately planted in George/Bulsara’s coat pocket.

Another question which should be fully explained in any public report about Operation Grange is why an officer with such a poor record of criminal investigation and judgment should have been entrusted with this sensitive, high profile and complex investigation.

C.   The conduct of Operation Grange: the chief suspects

There is widespread bafflement as to the conduct of Operation Grange.

One crucial aspect is their identification of the chief suspect allegedly responsible for abducting Madeleine McCann.   

Until a BBC Crimewatch McCann Special transmitted on 14 October 2013, the chief suspect had been a man carrying a child said to have been seen by the McCanns’ ‘Tapas 7’ friend, Jane Tanner, at exactly 9.15pm on Thursday 3 May, about 45 minutes before Madeleine was reported missing. As Gerry McCann had given evidence that he had checked on his child between 9.05pm and 9.10pm that evening, it was assumed that this abductor must have snatched Madeleine immediately after Gerry McCann left the apartment to return to the Tapas restaurant.

Surprisingly, however, the McCann Team did not release an artist’s sketch of the man that Jane Tanner said she had seen until nearly six months later. This unidentified man remained the chief suspect when Operation Grange began their work in May 2011 and he continued to be featured on the Met Police and the McCanns’ websites for a further two-and-a-half years. This was despite the clear findings of the Portuguese Police enquiry that no reliance could be placed on Jane Tanner’s evidence. 

DCI Redwood on the Crimewatch programme in October 2013 claimed to have ‘found’ this man, but gave a highly improbable account of how he came forward and what he had been doing that night. DCI Redwood, Operation Grange’s Investigating Officer, told the 6.7-million Crimewatch audience that the Met now thought this man had been taking his daughter home from a night crèche at the Ocean Club in Praia da Luz.                

There were several unlikely features of DCI Redwood’s account, namely:

1.   The man had waited for well over six years before approaching the police to say he now thought he might, after all, have been the man seen by Jane Tanner that night

2.   He had been walking past the McCanns’ apartment at exactly the same time as the man Jane Tanner said she had seen a man

3.   He was said by DCI Redwood to have been wearing clothes that week ‘uncannily similar’ to those described by Jane Tanner

4.   He was also carrying a young girl

5.   He was also said to have been carrying her in exactly the same way as described by Jane Tanner.

The viewing public were asked to believe that this man had only just come forward after six years and that, co-incidentally, he had no buggy with in which to carry the child, her mother was not with him, and he had no blanket or other covering to cover the child on a cold and windy night in Portugal – the temperature being only 13C at the time. In addition to all these improbable coincidences, if the man had indeed been walking in the same direction as the man seen by Jane Tanner, a map showed that he had clearly followed a mysteriously circuitous route from the night crèche to have been walking in that place in that direction.

The strange production of this man by DCI Redwood, six years and five months after Madeleine was reported missing, raised many questions and needs a full explanation.

If that was bizarre, then just as bizarre was the new chief suspect unveiled by DCI Redwood on the same programme, namely a man said to have been seen by several members of an Irish family at around 10.00pm on Thursday 3 May 2007, the very time that the McCanns were raising the alarm.

During the programme, DCI Redwood said that this man was ‘the centre of our focus’ – the new chief suspect. He also unveiled two quite different-looking e-fits and told the Crimewatch audience: ‘This is the man we are now looking for’.

It was obvious to those who have a working knowledge of the case that there were major problems about the reliability of both the alleged ‘sighting’ and the accompanying e-fits.

Here is a summary of the main issues about the alleged ‘sighting’ and the two different e-fits:

(1)  No member of the Irish family contacted the police about their claimed sighting until 13 days later

(2)  When they did so, it was the day after news came in that Robert Murat had been arrested. The father of the family had met Mr Murat on a number of previous occasions

(3)  The family have given at least four contradictory reasons for why they delayed reporting their sighting

(4)  The descriptions they gave of the person they said they saw matched in almost every respect the description given by the McCanns’ friend, Jane Tanner. Thus all three descriptions – Jane Tanner’s, the Irish family’s, and that of the ‘man from the crèche’ given out by DCI Redwood on the Crimewatch programme - are of an identical-looking man.

As the Met Police have now claimed that this sighting was that of a man carrying his children home from the night crèche, whose description matched that of Jane Tanner, this then raises the question of whether the 10.00pm sighting by the Irish family was either (A) of the ‘man from the crèche’, still carrying his child home (unlikely in the extreme) or (B) of another man altogether – but who looked very much like him, and also carrying a young blonde girl in pyjamas with no covering on her to protect her from the cold

(5)  When interviewed on 26 May 2007 in Portugal, all three members of the Irish family said that they would ‘never be able to recognise him if we saw him again’

(6)  The e-fits that were shown on the BBC Crimewatch programme were produced by Henri Exton, the former Head of Covert Intelligence at MI5. He had been employed by the McCanns’ leading private investigator at the time. Kevin Halligen. Later, between 2009 and 2013, Halligen spent over four years in jail for committing a major, £1 million-plus fraud. No date has been given for when he drew up these e-fits, but from public statements made by the McCanns, it appear that he and Exton were employed for around four months between April and August 2008. It is reasonable to assume therefore that these e-fist were drawn up during those four months

(7)  The claim that members of the Irish family were able to draw up not one, but two e-fits – of faces that looked quite different - 11 months or longer after their original sighting of him, seems unlikely in the extreme. All three Smiths who gave evidence in person to the Portuguese Police admitted that

a)    they had only managed to see the man for a few seconds at the very most

b)   it was dark at the time

c)    the street lighting, in their own words, was ‘weak’, and

d)   they were unable to get a clear view of his face because his face was ‘turned down’ and allegedly partly hidden by the child he was carrying

(8)  As can be seen, the two e-fits produced on Crimewatch by the Met Police look like quite different men. There is a big difference in the overall shape of the face, the size of the chin, length of the nose, hairstyle and so on. It is unusual, to say the very last, for any police force to produce two separate and quite different-looking images of a suspect that they really want to find

(9)  In addition to all the above reasons for questioning this claimed ‘sighting’, as a result of an article in the Sunday Times on 27 October 2013, we are now much better informed about the history of these e-fits. The Met Police said nothing about their history on BBC Crimewatch, despite knowing fine well what their history was.

But following the Sunday Times article, we now know:

a)    the e-fits were drawn up between April and August 2008

b)   they were shown to the McCanns by Henri Exton some time during this period 

c)    the McCanns are on record as stating that they showed these e-fits to both the Portuguese Police and the Leicestershire Police ‘by’ October 2009. They have not been willing to give the actual dates they were disclosed to each police force

d)   according to the McCanns, neither police force considered that it was worth informing the public about these e-fits

e)    soon after Operation Grange was set up in May 2011, the McCanns showed these e-fits to Operation Grange

f)     Operation Grange did not act to show these e-fits to the public until the BBC Crimewatch programme of 14 October 2013.

Thus it was a minimum of 5 years and 2 months, possibly up to 5 years and 6 months, before these e-fits were shown to the public.

These very strange issues concerning the ‘sightings’ of three men all allegedly fitting the same description - and the precise circumstances of the history of the e-fits - cry out for the police to explain their conduct.                                                                                                    

D.  The conduct of Operation Grange: the BBC Crimewatch programme of 14 October 2013

I have already made reference to the Crimewatch programme.

The BBC admitted that it spent over 6 months and £1 million on the preparations for the programme.  The Met Police must have spent a similar amount. It received huge promotion by the BBC and the mainstream press, such that audience figures suggest it was watched by 6.7 million people - a Crimewatch record.

     

During the programme, a purported reconstruction of the events of 3 May was shown to viewers. However, it was not faithful to the reported events of that evening. A host of material facts about that day that were made public in August 2008 when the Portuguese Police released full details of their  investigation  on a DVD. But nay of them were omitted from the Met/BBC reconstruction. This is highly unusual because normally a Crimewatch programne will disclose all leading material facts. For example, contradictory accounts of events and changes of story by some of the main witnesses were not featured in the programme. Thus the viewers did not get a balanced picture of events that day. That has led to concerns expressed by many that the programme was much more about public perception than about seeking relevant information from viewers - the normal purpose of Crimewatch.

That impression was underlined by the fact that the two e-fits were shown to a British audience but not to any audience in Portugal, where the actual alleged sighting happened. There must also be a major question mark about whether two different e-fits of a man allegedly seen six years and five months before the programme was transmitted were ever likely to bring in any new information. The Met Police’s response to a Freedom of Information question I submitted at the end of last year revealed that, two years further on, this ‘mystery man’ had still not been identified. And of course forensic enquiries conducted in the McCanns’ apartment revealed no forensic traces of any abductor.

E.   The conduct of Operation Grange: reliance on the unreliable evidence provided by the McCanns’ own investigation team

Early on in the life of Operation Grange, the Investigating Officer, DCI Andy Redwood, claimed that a major advantage of his investigation was that it ‘brought together’ evidence from three separate investigations, or ‘strands’: those of the Portuguese Police, Leicestershire Police, and the McCanns’ own investigation team.

This raised a major issue of what reliance could be placed on any ‘evidence’ from the McCanns’ own investigation team, given that all the following facts have emerged during the past nine years:

1)   The initial detective team they appointed, Barcelona-based Metodo 3, was highly controversial, with a chequered history including its directors having been arrested in a major telephone tapping scandal

2)   Its Director, Francisco Marco, issued a stream of lies during December 2007, claiming, inter alia, that:

a)    They knew Madeleine was alive

b)   They knew where she was being held

c)    They were closing in on the kidnappers, and

d)   Madeleine would be ‘home for Christmas’.

Despite these very blatant untruths, the Directors of the Find Madeleine Fund continued to employ them for many months, according to some reports up to March 2009.

3)   In February 2008, one of Metodo 3’s top investigators on the Madeleine McCann investigation was remanded in custody - and spent four years in prison - on serious charges of theft of cocaine and corruption charges (before being employed by the McCann, he had been a Detective Inspector on the Catalonia Regional Drugs Squad. He had been close to a 27-strong gang of career criminals and drugs dealers who were described by the judge hearing the case as ‘exceptionally violent’.

4)   Furthermore, in 2012, several staff of Metodo 3 who worked for the McCanns were arrested and charged with illegal telephone tapping, charges which they admitted.

5)   Moreover, in 2014, two former Metodo 3 investigators, Julian Peribanez and Antonio Tamarit, wrote a book; ‘La Cortina de Humo’ - The Smokescreen - which demonstrated how Metodo 3’s boss, Francisco Marco, who headed the McCann Team’s private investigations in 2007 and in 2008, had comprehensively lied about the numbers of people he had on his investigation team, and what they were really employed to do.  I have attached a translation of the relevant chapter for your information.        

6)   Kevin Halligen, employed as the lead McCann Team investigator from April to late August 2008, was also remanded in custody on fraud charges in October 2009 and spent four years in jail, having been found guilty of a £1 million fraud. According to a lengthy and well-researched article by Mark Hollingsworth in the Evening Standard in August 2009, Halligen did little or no practical work of value in the hunt for Madeleine but instead squandered most of the £560,000 he was paid by the McCann Team on ‘living the high life’ in luxury hotels in the U.S., Italy and the U.K. with his then girlfriend, Shirin Trachiotis. After being on the run, wanted for fraud, he was eventually located in the £700-a-night Bank Hotel, Oxford, where he and his girlfriend were holed up.

7)   The McCann Team, later, in 2009, employed two former British detectives, ex DI Dave Edgar and ex DetSgt Arthur Cowley, as their lead investigators. In August that year, Dave Edgar and the McCanns’ PR spokesman fronted a major press conference where they announced that:

a)    a British banker, who had been drinking for several hours in the bars around the port of Barcelona, had ‘agonised’ for two years but had now come forward with information that, three nights after Madeleine had been reported missing, he had been approached on Barcelona dockside at 2.00am by a young woman who said: “Have you got my new daughter?” 

b)   the young woman was said to ‘look like Victoria Beckham’ and have an Australian accident

c)    Madeleine may have been brought by boat from Praia da Luz, Portugal,  to Barcelona between 3 and 6 May 2007, and that

d)   Madeleine may have been with the woman on a large yacht that had sailed to Australia the next day.

This press conference received huge coverage in the British TV and print media.

However, a lengthy report by Tom Worden, Martin Delgado and Andrew Chapman in the Mail on Sunday on 15 August 2009 drew attention to multiple problems with the entire basis of story, which was much-hyped in the British mainstream media. Here are some extracts from the Mail’s report, which was headed: 

"Why did Madeleine McCann detectives ask so few questions?":


“Private detectives leading the hunt for Madeleine McCann faced questions last night after a Mail on Sunday investigation revealed apparent shortcomings in chasing a 'strong lead'. The detectives failed to make even rudimentary inquiries before announcing a 'significant’ development in the worldwide search for the six-year-old.’


“At a Press conference in London, lead investigator David Edgar appealed for help in finding a 'bit of a Victoria Beckham lookalike'…Mr Edgar, 52, told the 50 journalists from several countries: ‘It's a strong lead. Madeleine could have been in Barcelona by this point. The fact the conversation took place near the marina could be significant’.


“The Mail on Sunday, however, has established that members of Mr Edgar's team who had visited Barcelona:

·         Failed to speak to anyone working at the seafood restaurant near where the agitated woman was seen at 2am.

·         Failed to ask the port authority about movement of boats around the time Madeleine disappeared.

·         Failed to ask if the mystery woman had been filmed on CCTV.

·         Knew nothing about the arrival of an Australian luxury yacht just after Madeleine vanished until told by British journalists, who gave them the captain's mobile phone number.

·         Failed to interview anyone at a nearby dockside bar where, according to Mr Edgar, the mystery woman was later seen drinking.

·         Failed to ask British diplomats in Spain for advice before or during the visit.

“Also, Spanish police could not confirm that they had been contacted by the British investigators. Last night Mr Edgar said: 'We are not above criticism and I take responsibility for any shortcomings. If somebody has not done what they should have done, that's my job to deal with that’.”

“The Mail on Sunday's inquiry by a Spanish-speaking reporter in Barcelona last week has exposed worrying gaps in the British detectives' strategy, including failure to question several people who might have vital information. Barcelona port director Joan Guitart said: 'Nobody has been here asking questions about Madeleine or this Australian woman. This is the first I have heard about any possible link to the port’. A source at the British Embassy in Madrid said: 'The detectives did not inform us or the consulate in Barcelona that they were coming to Spain, nor request any assistance in their investigation’. A Barcelona-based private detective with more than 20 years' experience of missing persons cases said: 'I cannot understand why the Madeleine detectives would have released this story and e-fit to the public without first making their own investigation in the port. It beggars belief that they did not even speak to the owner of the restaurant or the port authorities’.”

Understandably, there were many who suggested that this story had been manufactured simply in order to provide another opportunity for another set of headlines about Madeleine and was never a realistic lead. It raised stil more legitimate questions about the activities of the McCann Team’s private investigators.     

F.   The conduct of Operation Grange: contradictory statements and actions about what happened to Madeleine

Operation Grange’s conduct of this case has been marked by a number of both obtuse and baffling statements and actions about what has happened to Madeleine.

Early on, in a TV interview in 2012, DCI Redwood offered the comment that “Madeleine may be alive…or she may be dead”.

In 2014, Operation Grange mounted a huge operation to search either two or three (both were stated) waste ground sites in Praia da Luz. The search was deliberately conducted in the full glare of publicity, with camera teams from many countries covering the search. There were British police officers with pickaxes, augers and forensic bags combing the ground, whilst a phalanx of Portuguese Police officers looked on and guarded the site. It was clear that - despite the Portuguese Police having thoroughly searched these sites many years ago – Operation Grange were looking for forensic evidence of a dead body. 

In addition, Operation Grange officers searched the village from a Portuguese military helicopter, a top-of-the-range Mark III Alouette. The Portuguese Police issued a statement that the British police would have to meet the costs of hiring the helicopter, guarding the site, and also the expense of acting as ‘Rogatory Interviewers’ and translators of interviews with no fewer than 11 suspects who were summoned for interviews under caution in 2014.

Soon after these events, DCI Redwood was quoted as saying that ‘Madeleine may have been dead before she left the apartment’. This obtuse and baffling statement could have meant a number of things, but most people assumed that DCI Redwood was inferring that the abductor murdered Madeleine in the apartment, carried her out, and hid her body somewhere.

Redwood had already committed himself on BBC Crimewatch to saying that a man seen by the Irish family was (and still is) his chief suspect.  Thus, taking all his statements together, it became clear that his hypothesis was that a man had killed and removed Madeleine from her apartment and was still carrying her dead body through the streets of Praia da Luz about half a mile away, several minutes later, heading towards the beach. 

However, despite all the above, the new Senior Investigating Officer in the case, Detective Chief Superintendent Mick Duthie, called a hasty press conference on Monday 18 April this year in which he was reported, in all the following day’s mainstream newspapers (Tuesday 19 April) as saying that Operation Grange was now pursing ‘reasonable lines of enquiry’ which suggested that Madeleine ‘may still be alive’.

It was only later that day that the reason for this sudden proclamation that Madeleine may be alive became clear. On the morning of that very day, it became public that Dr Goncalo Amaral, the original investigation co-ordinator in the case, had succeeded in obtaining a unanimous verdict of three Portuguese Court of Appeal judges who upheld his appeal and over-turned a lower court verdict that his book, ‘The Truth About A Lie’, was libellous. The Appeal Court ruled that it was not libellous and said that under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – ‘Freedom of Expression’ – he was perfectly entitled to publish his conclusions on the case. The Court also ruled that the McCanns would have to pay the entire costs of their seven-year legal fight against Dr Amaral, amounting to an estimated £500,000.  

The question arises as to whether the Met Police press conference last Monday (18 April) helped in any way to further the Met Police’s investigation. Manifestly it did not. The only reasonable inference to be drawn by the Met Police’s conduct is that the press conference was arranged, once again, to influence public perception, and to counteract what they knew in advance would be adverse publicity the following day when the Portuguese Court of Appeal verdict in the case of McCanns v Amaral became known.   

G.  The conduct of Operation Grange – A procession of statements and leaks about very unlikely suspects

Entirely contrary to normal police practice, Scotland Yard have repeatedly made statements about improbable suspects. In addition, there were ‘leaks’ of even more improbable suspects, which news media claimed were sourced from Scotland Yard but never denied. Just to list some of these illustrate the extraordinary procession of unlikely suspects:

·         ‘We have 38 persons of interest, 12 of whom are British’

·         ‘A burglar in the McCanns’ apartment who was disturbed when Madeleine woke up – a burglary gone wrong’

·         ‘A tractor-driver from  the Cape Verde Islands who is now dead’

·         ‘A man from the Ocean Club who had a spare set of keys’

·         ‘A man who smelt of rubbish bins who was trying to access the apartments of British families’    

·         ‘Six British men seen driving a white van’

·         ‘It may have been one of 650 registered sex offenders whose records we are checking’

·         ‘We will be interviewing 11 suspects under caution and asking them 254 prepared written questions, including ‘Did you kill Madeleine McCann?’

Quite apart from this plethora of unlikely suspects, in some cases the identifying of possible suspects in this highly irregular fashion could have altered any person responsible for Madeleine’s disappearance and caused him/her to ‘go to ground’. That is irresponsible police conduct and once again cries out for a rational explanation.          

H.  The conduct of Operation Grange: The visit of Alison Saunders, now the Director of Prosecutions, to Portugal in 2013 

On 21 June 2013, the Guardian (along with other newspapers) reported that:

“Alison Saunders, the Senior Crown Prosecutor for London, and her colleague Jenny Hopkins, Head of the Complex Casework Unit, discussed new leads in the inquiry with their Portuguese counterparts…

“The Met began a review into the case - funded by the Home Office - after Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, appealed to the Prime Minister, David Cameron, for help. The Portuguese investigation was closed in 2008 and there have been repeated discussions between the British and Portuguese authorities with a view to reopening the inquiry. So far the Portuguese have refused to do so, saying concrete new evidence would be required…”

It is far from clear what the high profile visit of these two top CPS officers achieved, if anything. There has been no prosecution of anybody. Any report on  Operation Grange should be able to explain in clear terms what was the purpose of sending these two high-ranking CPS officers to Portugal.

I.     The conduct of Operation Grange: The obsessive re-publication of endless statistics

One of the features of Operation Grange over the past five years has been the repetitive procession of statistics about the amount of work they have carried out. The latest such occasion was in October 2015 when they announced the following statistics:

·         The inquiry took 1,338 statements

·         The inquiry collected 1,027 exhibits

·         Officers investigated more than 60 persons of interest.

·         A total of 650 sex offenders were considered

·         Reports of 8,685 potential sightings of Madeleine around the world were followed up

·         7,154 actions were raised

·         560 lines of inquiry were identified, and

·         More than 30 requests were made to countries across the world asking for work to be undertaken on behalf of the Met.

In addition to the above list, Operation Grange has also informed us previously that they:

·         Searched the mobile ’phone records of over 11,000 mobile ’phone users across 30 countries

·         Travelled to Portugal over 30 times

·         Interviewed 11 named suspects under caution, and

·         Served several ‘Rogatory Requests’ on the Portuguese Police.

On the face of it, that looks like a very comprehensive and thorough piece of work. Yet, so far as can be ascertained, all of this prodigious level of activity has not brought us one jot nearer finding out what really happened to Madeleine McCann.

According to the files released in July 2008 by the Portuguese Police, there was no forensic trace of an abductor having been in the McCanns’ apartment. A finger-print was found on the window of the apartment, but it was that of Kate McCann. No-one heard or saw the abduction taking place. The person thought to have been the abductor turns out, so DCI Redwood told 6.7 million people on Crimewatch, to have been a man using the night creche on the night Madeleine was reported missing, who hadn’t bothered for six years to tell any police force that he might have been the person seen by Jane Tanner.

The only other evidence of Madeleine being abducted, apart from the McCanns’ evidence, is that of the controversial alleged sighting by an Irish family at 10.00pm that night. The Met Police admitted in answer to a Freedom of Information request in 2015 - eight years after this alleged sighting - that they had still not identified this man.

The question arises as to whether the massive amount of money, time and effort (5 years and around £14 million to date) was in the remotest degree proportional to the vast amount of effort expended. Any Home Office report should inform the public on what basis the Review and then the formal Investigation was ever thought to have a reasonable prospect of success in finding out what happened to Madeleine.

Nine years on, do we know who took her? - No. Do we know where she has been taken? – No. So what exactly, in real terms, has been achieved by Operation Grange? Can we please be told? The taxpayer has funded this.                      

J.   The conduct of Operation Grange – Other matters

Certain other matters ought to be covered in any report for the public on Operation Grange.

One is the frequently-made claim that the Operation Grange team were working ‘in close collaboration’ with their opposite numbers in Portugal. This has been flatly contradicted in many well-sourced newspaper reports in the U.K. and Portugal. One of these spoke of ‘open warfare’ between the two police forces. There has never been an tangible evidence of any ongoing Portuguese Police investigation after the case was shelved in July 2008. All the indications are that the British presence in Portugal was barely tolerated, at best, by the relevant Portuguese authorities.        

The team’s justification for, reportedly, staying at some of Portugal’s top 5-star and 4-star hotels is another matter on which many members of the public require an explanation.

In addition, the Met Police allowed frequent press reports to appear promising ‘imminent arrests’. These were not denied by Operation Grange. Yet there have never been any arrests. Why did the Met allow these excitable stories to be published without any correction? – as it appears they were all untrue.       

K.  Questions about the involvement of the British government and the security services in the Madeleine McCann case        

The petition preamble asked that any Home Office report “should cover the role of the government, the security services & UK police forces”.

 

Many people have, understandably, questioned the enormous scale of government and security service involvement in this case. A convincing answer has not yet been forthcoming. Amongst the unusual amount of such involvement have been the following issues:

·         Which government and other agencies formed part of the secret government task group convened under the leadership of  Matt Baggott, then Chief Constable of Leicestershire Police force, on 8 May 2007, just five days after Madeleine was reported missing. A Freedom of Information request seeking information about which agencies and persons were represented on that committee was refused. Why was that? What is so secretive about the identities of those persons employed at the taxpayer’s expense to help find out what really happened to Madeleine McCanns?

·         Why was an unusually high level of ambassadorial and consular assistance given to the McCanns from the very first day, wholly disproportionate to that given in any other similar ‘missing child’ case?

·         Why, within days of Madeleine being reported missing, did the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, send the Director of his 40-strong Media Monitoring Unit at the Central Office of Information, to act as a full-time Public Relations Office for the McCanns, a role he is still required to perform today?

·         Why was Special Branch involved, e.g. to convey the McCanns to their home after they returned to England having just been declared formal suspects in the case? Kate McCann wrote on page 259 of her book, ‘madeleine’: 0“A Special Branch Officer drove us to Rothley”. What was the full extent of Special Branch’s involvement, and why was it necessary?

·         There are several references in the case to MI5 being involved in the case. Again, why were they involved, and to what extent?

·         In particular, MI5 staff confronted one potentially very significant witness in the case, namely Mr Martin Grime, the top British sniffer dog handler, whose two dogs, Eddie and Keela, alerted to ‘cadaver scent contaminant’, blood and body fluids in 17 locations associated with the McCanns in Praia da Luz. On his return from his mission with his dogs in Portugal in August 2007, Martin Grime reported to Dr Amaral, the investigation co-ordinator, that on his return to England, he had been stopped and questioned by two MI5 officers at Faro Airport. Credible sources since then suggest that Martin  Grime was prevailed on by the two MI5 officers to ‘tone down’ his evidence when submitting his final report. [I note here that the McCanns (a) deny that the dogs alerted to cadaver scent contaminant, body fluids and blood, (b) maintain that without corroborative forensic evidence Mr Grime’s report cannot be used as evidence in a court of law, and (c) note that the DNA evidence, whilst revealing that the blood and body fluids could have come from Madeleine, did not amount to proof that they did].      

·         The three ‘private detectives’ who worked for the McCanns under the umbrella of ‘Oakley International’ in 2008 – Kevin Halligen, Henri Exton and Tim Craig-Harvey – all had significant and recent experience working closely with the government and/or the security services. Halligen, who was jailed for four years from 2009 to 2013, had worked closely with the Ministry of Defence on lithium batteries. Henri Exton had been the former Head of Covert Intelligence for MI5. Tim Craig-Harvey also had connections with the security services. Was the government, and the secret committee set up under the chairmanship of the Chief Constable of Leicestershire, Matt Baggott, on 8 May 2007, aware of or involved in their appointment?

·         The government is closely linked to the risk and security assessment company, Control Risks Group, which was dispatched to Praia da Luz in the days immediately following Madeleine being reported missing. Was the government involved in sending Control Risks Group and, whether they were or not, did the government help to fund the involvement of Control Risks Group?

·         Gerry McCann spoke of several personal calls he made to the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. Later, Gordon Brown was reported to have leaned heavily on the Portuguese Police to release a description of a man allegedly seen by the McCanns’ friend, Jane Tanner, at 9.15pm pm on 3 May 2007 (whom Operation Grange has subsequently identified as an innocent man whose child was at the night creche that evening). Gordon Brown, as Prime Minster from June 2007, subsequently personally discussed the Madeleine McCann case with Portuguese President Jose Socrates (now on remand in custody facing serious corruption charges) on at least two occasions. There was also evidence that Gordon Brown was regularly in touch with the Portuguese government demanding the sacking of the Madeleine McCann investigation co-ordinator, Goncalo Amaral, and was told beforehand that, on 2 October 2007, he would indeed be removed from his post. Any report should fully explain the great extent of his personal involvement in this matter.

Many people want answers to these and other questions.

Colleagues and I have in the past have called, and still do, for a full public enquiry to be held, with the power to summon witnesses, into all aspects of the investigations into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Nevertheless, this petition confines itself to a need for a report to the public on the performance of Operation Grange and related matters.      

I and the other 3,110 people who have signed the petition trust that you will be able to order the Home Office to prepare a full report on the work of Operation Grange and the involvement of the government, the security services and various British police forces, over a period of nearly nine years, during which time there has apparently been little or no progress towards understanding what really happened to her.

Yours sincerely

Anthony Bennett                                      

Enclosure:

APPENDIX: ‘THE SMOKESCREEN’ by Julian Peribanez and Antonio Tamarit

(August 2014, ISBN 978-84-941649-8-9) - CHAPTER 13:  THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ‘LOS CAGOTS’: OUR WORK FOR METODO 3 - Translation commissioned by the Madeleine Foundation, February 2016

ADDENDUM TO LETTER

Tel: 01279 635789                                                       66 Chippingfield

e-mail: ajsbennett@btinternet.com                                HARLOW

                                                                                      Essex

                                                                                        CM17 0DH

                                                                         Friday 29 April 2016 (2^nd letter)

Rt Hon David Cameron MP

Prime Minster

10 Downing Street

LONDON

SW1A  2AA

BY HAND

Dear Mr Cameron

re: Petition on the Prime Minister’s website to order the Home Secretary to publish a report on the Madeleine McCann Enquiry [Operation Grange] - ADDENDUM

I am submitting this Addendum to my letter in view of the extraordinary and ridiculous statements made, apparently on the record, by Operation Grange officers about what they think really happened to Madeleine McCann.

I will first set out the claims made by Operation Grange officers in three newspapers this week, the Star, the Sun and the Daily Mail.

 

The Star

·         Maddie McCann 'snatched in botched break-in' Cops sure they know what happened to girl

·         Brit police are convinced they know what happened to Madeleine McCann – and believe they spoke to her attacker

·         That theory is that the tot was snatched after disturbing burglars who had been targeting the Portuguese holiday block where she was staying

·         Police believe three suspects they have been pursuing hold the key to the nine-year mystery

·         The trio have already been declared arguidos – or suspects – and were interviewed at least twice.

·         This remaining lead is thought to be key

·         They are linked by a series of phone calls they made to each other near the McCanns’ apartment around the time she vanished

·         The suspects are Jose Carlos da Silva, 30, who used to drive guests to their apartments at the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz from where Madeleine vanished, drifter Ricardo Rodrigues, 24, and drug addict Paulo Ribeiro, 53.

Sun and Daily Mail

·         Madeleine McCann 'was kidnapped during a botched burglary by a gang of thieves who British police have already quizzed' but are blocked from questioning again

·         Madeleine McCann was snatched by a group of thieves, it has been claimed

·         Police believe she disturbed them as they robbed her holiday apartment

·         This is thought to be the final line of inquiry being considered by the Met

·         Madeleine McCann was kidnapped by a group of thieves because she woke up while they robbed her family's holiday apartment, it has been claimed

·         It is believed to centre on a group of thieves which included a 16-year-old teenager and a man who worked at the Mark Warner resort in Portugal when she disappeared in 2007.

·         Phone calls raise questions about the group's actions on the night of the three-year-old's disappearance

·         It's claimed they have been identified as suspects by British police, but officers are being blocked from accessing them by Portuguese cops who say no new evidence has been brought forward

·         An officer told the paper: 'It has dogged the investigation all the way through and it's happening again. If we can't question the three suspects again the trail goes cold and the case will be shelved'

·         When they were previously interviewed, the men admitted theft from apartments at the complex but denied any involvement in the youngster's disappearance.

In my first letter to you, in Section G, I referred to one of the criticisms of Operation Grange being its ‘procession of unlikely suspects’ which had been  paraded by Operation Grange at regular intervals in the British press.

One only has to give very brief thought to this latest bizarre claim by Operation Grange to see the extreme improbability of their claims. These are some of the most obvious problems with their tale:

(1)  Why would a team of three burglars raid that particular apartment, with the McCann and their friends regularly checking it?

(2)  Why did no-one else see or hear this team of burglars raiding the apartment and carrying away a child who – if she woke up and ‘disturbed’ the burglars – was presumably awake, struggling and probably screaming?

(3)  Does Scotland Yard have any forensic evidence whatsoever from the McCanns’ apartment linking any of these three men to their alleged presence in that apartment that night? – No forensic evidence of an intruder has ever been found

(4)  Did these alleged burglars actually steal anything from the apartment? The McCanns said nothing was missing from their apartment apart from Madeleine 

(5)  Why on earth would any burglar, raiding an apartment which was in the dark, carry away a three-year-old child who woke up, instead of just making haste and making off?

(6)  Does the description of any of the three men match the man who was DCI Andy Redwood’s chief suspect – and ‘the centre of our focus’ - on the BBC Crimewatch McCann Special transmitted on 14 October 2013?

(7)  What other evidence is there of the alleged activity of these three men on the night in question, apart from their making ’phone calls to each other?

(8)  Is it seriously claimed by Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, other senior officers of the Met, and the entire Operation Grange team, that the Portuguese Police have been furnished by Operation Grange with overwhelming evidence of the guilt of these three Portuguese men’s guilt, and yet have failed to bring charges against them?  Is it not far, far more likely that the Portuguese Police can see this for what it really is - an utterly pathetic bogus claim and boast by Scotland Yard that they have ‘found’ those responsible for Madeleine’s disappearance - and are seeking, as they have done throughout, to blame the Portuguese authorities     for the failure to identify the person or persons really responsible.

You are the proud Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Can you honestly be associated with, and satisfied with, this outcome of an investigation which you personally set up, at Rebekah Brooks’ request, and has taken five years and cost around £14 million – to end up with this farcical claim by Operation Grange?

Yours sincerely

Anthony Bennett