From:
Ms Jill Havern and members of ‘The Complete Mystery of Madeleine McCann’
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Rt.
Hon. Mrs Theresa May
Prime
Minister
10 Downing Street
LONDON
W1A
1AA
Commissioner
Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe
Metropolitan
Police
8-10 Broadway,
LONDON
SW1H 0BG
Monday,
26 September 2016
Dear
Prime Minister and Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe
The conduct of the Operation Grange
investigation into the reported disappearance of Madeleine McCann
First of all, Prime Minister, we
congratulate you on your appointment as Prime Minister and wish you every
success in your new position. The serious matters raised in this letter will of
course be very familiar to you, as you had meetings with the McCanns and their
advisers when you were Home Secretary, and asked Sir Paul Stephenson to set up
Operation Grange.
You may also be aware of three
petitions that were placed on the Prime
Minister’s website by members of my forum, in 2010, 2014 and one in 2015, which
addressed issues about the investigations into Madeleine McCann’s reported
disappearance. The first two called for a public enquiry into the
investigations. The most recent called on the Home Office to publish a full
report on the work of Operation Grange.
According to statements made in the
press on 3 April this year, you – as the then Home Secretary – sanctioned
further expenditure on Operation Grange of £95,000, which was said to be for a
further six months to ‘conclude’ this review and investigation. That meant that
Operation Grange was scheduled to be completed on 3 October, in a week’s time.
Since then we have learnt that the funding is to be extended by a further six
months, with the team being granted a further £100,000.
The forum:
‘Complete Mystery of Madeleine McCann’
I write in my capacity as the owner
of the internet forum, ‘The Complete Mystery of Madeleine McCann’, set up in
November 2009. The letter is sent on behalf of my admin team, our members and
our regular guests and visitors, who number tens of thousands every day. We
currently have over 6,350 members, many of whom read us every day for updates,
and hundreds of whom contribute by way of research, comment, and analysis every
month.
Long-term forum members include many
with professional backgrounds, including the police, the law and the medical
professions, and others with technical skills in such fields as forensics,
photography and statement analysis.
The forum is far and away the
best-read Madeleine McCann discussion forum on the internet, and has been
referred to regularly in the press and in books such as ‘Looking for
Madeleine’, by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan.
It is with this background that we
urge you to consider most carefully the following issues relating to Operation
Grange.
The remit
of Operation Grange
The very first consideration must be
the remit allocated to Operation Grange from the outset. The relevant parts of
it read as follows:
“The activity,
in the first instance, will be that of an ‘investigative review’. This will
entail a review of the whole of the investigation(s) which have been conducted
in to the circumstances of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance. The focus of the
review will be of the material held by three main stakeholders (and in the
following order of primacy);
The Portuguese Law Enforcement agencies.
UK Law
Enforcement agencies,
Other private
investigative agencies/staff and organisations.
“The investigative review is intended to collate, record and analyse what has
gone before. It is to examine the case and seek to determine, (as
if the abduction occurred in the UK) what additional, new
investigative approaches we would take and which can assist the Portuguese
authorities in progressing the matter…
“The
‘investigative review’ will be conducted with transparency, openness and
thoroughness…” .
It was clear from the outset
that the initial investigative review had a strictly limited remit. That is
highly unusual for any review which purports to be a genuine,
comprehensive review. Most ‘cold case’
reviews start with a ‘clean sheet’, so to speak.
Crucially, however, the review
insisted that it would only investigate ‘the abduction’. That meant that, from
the very first, Operation Grange had ruled out any consideration of whether or
not the McCanns could have been directly involved in the disappearance of
Madeleine.
The purpose of this letter is
not to make any accusation against the McCanns. It is simply to point out that,
despite a number of indications that they may have been involved, the Operation
Grange team were told from the start not to investigate them.
During his investigative review,
the Investigating Officer, Detective Chief Inspector Andy Redwood stated that “Primarily, what we sought to do from the beginning, is trying to draw
everything back to, to zero, if you like ..”. Plainly this was not
the case, as any potential involvement of the McCanns was ruled out from the
beginning.
In addition, on
the day that your predecessor David Cameron signalled that he had ordered the
Home Office to set up a review, his spokesman declared that the purpose of the
review was to ‘help the family’. It was plain, then, that the officers leading
the Operation Grange team were simply not allowed to consider any involvement
of the McCanns in Madeleine’s disappearance.
The interim report of the Portuguese
Police, 10 September 2007
I will not in
this letter set out the many indications that the McCanns may have been
directly involved in the disappearance of their daughter. That is something
that any genuine re-investigation, with a remit not limited to declaring in
advance that Madeleine had been abducted, should examine. I will however refer
to the interim report of the Portuguese Police, dated 10 September 2007, a
document made public in July 2008. It was compiled by Chief Inspector Tavares
de Almeida. In a lengthy document, the contents of which have never been
convincingly refuted, he set out the following indications that the McCanns may
have been involved. These are all direct quotations from a translation of his
report:
1 No abduction “As time
went by, the abduction scenario was not confirmed. The abduction hypothesis did
not stand up”.
2 The McCanns worked on their
version of events “The information that was initially
collected from family and friends was uncertain. In addition, the McCanns and
their friends worked on their account of events in order to strengthen and
defend their version of what had happened Madeleine”
3 ‘Distorted’ information
“The information from the immediate family and their group of friends which is
fundamental in investigating this type of crime was always distorted…The
group’s initial informal statements given during the initial stages of the
investigation immediately introduced the abduction hypothesis. But even simple
things were the subject of misinformation:
was the window open or closed?
was the shutter up or down?
was the balcony door open or
closed?
was the front door merely shut
or locked with a key?
4 Changes of story
“The media attention that has been given to the case and the search for
information by the said media has led to an evolution in Madeleine’s parents’
statements. All the information that has been made public has contributed to
the McCanns rebuilding and adapting their story to fit the eventual police
questions”.
5 Excuses for corpse scent and blood
“When the media first informed the public that blood had been detected ‘in the
car and in the apartment’, Dr Kate McCann and members of her family made
statements to the public with the simple excuse that it had been someone who
had access to the apartment that had deliberately placed this evidence there.
Now they even say that it was the criminal investigation team that placed this
‘false’ evidence (i.e. blood and cadaver odour in the apartment and in the
car). In an attempt to justify the finding of [Madeleine’s] blood in the
apartment, Dr Kate McCann went even further, stating on that occasion that
Madeleine sometimes suffered nosebleeds”.
6 Altering the crime scene
“There is strong evidence that the crime scene was altered, and some furniture
was moved around: an intentional alteration of things in that apartment took
place, in order to create a false scenario that doesn’t match reality, in an
attempt to develop opportunities to create a bogus abduction scenario. Those
changes are indications that the abduction was a stage-managed
simulation.
7 Findings of a top sniffer dog
handler In addition, Tavares de Almeida listed the
findings of top British dog handler, Martin Grime, who now works for the F.B.I.
in the U.S.
In early August 2007, he took with him to Portugal two springer spaniels,
Eddie, a ‘cadaver dog’ who was trained to alert to the past presence of a
corpse, and Keela, a ‘blood dog’ trained to detect blood. According to Mr Grime,
the two dogs between them alerted on 17 occasions either to the scent of the
past presence of a corpse or to blood in locations connected to the McCanns:
their apartment, their clothes and in their hired car. They alerted to no other
items or locations in Praia da Luz.
8 The unreliable evidence of Jane
Tanner “Continuing with
our analysis of information offered to us, one of the group’s members, Jane
Tanner…became an important witness…She said she saw someone crossing the street
at dinner time from the location of the McCanns’ apartment towards Robert
Murat’s house…This information directed and occupied our work for a long time.
This may be an example of how information that is not correct may not only
delay the investigation but could even have led to losing the little
girl. Jane Tanner insisted on the truthfulness of her account. This led
to certain scenarios being developed. But these scenarios were not sustained in
reality..”
9 “The precise moment when Jane Tanner chose to make her statement about
what she had ‘seen’ and the explanation for choosing that moment, is unreal.
That is to say: it is not easy to accept that any witness (from the group), on
seeing someone with a child in their arms walking away from the McCanns’
apartment, didn’t act and speak immediately. Then there is her description of
the abductor being altered, or ‘perfected’. These reasons mean there is little
credibility in what she says”
10 “There was a discrepancy [about the moment Jane Tanner allegedly saw
an abductor] between the statements of Dr Gerald McCann and Jane Tanner. They
claimed to have passed each other at only two or three metres’ distance [7 to
10 feet], yet failed to see each other. How could they position themselves as
both being together in quite a confined space, yet both fail to see each other
walking by; or, more correctly, one sees the other but the other doesn’t see
her? Even the exact location where they supposedly crossed each other’s paths
is not very well defined by both”.
The following are direct quotations from Tavares de Almeida’s report, on the
subject of the alerts by Martin Grime’s cadaver dogs:
“Apartment 5A, Ocean Club resort, the McCanns’ apartment from where the
child disappeared: The cadaver dog alerted to the scent of a corpse
in the master bedroom, in a corner, by the wardrobe; in living room, behind the
sofa, and by the side window, while the bloodhound alerted to blood in the
living room behind the sofa, and by the side window (in exactly the same spot
that had been signalled by the cadaver dog)”.
“Front garden
of Apartment 5A:
The cadaver dog alerted to the scent of a corpse on one of the flower beds (the
dog handler however commented on the ‘lightness’ of the odour in this
location)”.
“The McCann family’s clothes and belongings: The cadaver dog alerted to
the scent of a corpse on two pieces of clothing belonging to Dr Kate McCann,
one piece of clothing belonging to Madeleine (a red T-shirt) and on Madeleine’s
soft toy [Cuddle Cat]. The cadaver odour was detected when the toy was still
inside the McCanns’ residence in July 2007; the scent was later confirmed
outside the house as well”.
“The vehicle that was used by the McCann family: The cadaver dog alerted
to the scent of a corpse on the car key and on the inside of the car boot, while
the bloodhound also marked the car key and the inside of the car boot”.
“In a total of 10 cars examined [in an underground car park) the cadaver dog
and the blood dog marked only the car of the McCann family, first rented on 27
May”.
Tavares de Almeida concluded his report as follows:
“From everything that was established, the facts point in the direction of the
death of Madeleine McCann occurring on the night of 3 May 2007, inside
apartment 5A, at the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz, which was occupied by
the McCann couple and by their three children. There is a coincidence between
the markings of cadaver odour and blood [by the two dogs], according to the
(partial) Laboratory Report that has been annexed to the files.
“The said marking occurred behind the living room sofa (cadaver
odour/blood/DNA), which unarguably proves that said piece of furniture was
pushed back by someone, after the death of Madeleine McCann was confirmed.
Because of the few traces that were recovered on location and subject to
examination, it has to be admitted as a strong hypothesis that it [the room]
was subject to a clean-up operation at some time following the occurrence
of death”.
“From everything that we have discovered, our files result in the
following conclusions:
A the minor Madeleine McCann died in
Apartment 5A at the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz, on the night of 3 May
2007
B a simulation - a staged hoax - of
an abduction took place
C in order to render the child’s
death impossible before 10.00pm, a situation of checking of the McCann couple’s
children while they slept was concocted
D Dr Gerald McCann and Dr Kate
McCann are involved in the concealment of the corpse of their daughter,
Madeleine McCann
E at this moment, there seems to be
no strong indications that the child’s death was other than the result of a
tragic accident…
F from what has been established up
to now, everything indicates that the McCann couple, in self-defence, did not
want to deliver up Madeleine’s corpse immediately and voluntarily, and there is
a strong possibility therefore that it was moved from the initial place where
she died. This situation may raise questions concerning the circumstances in
which the death of the child took place.
I should at this point add the explanations that the McCanns have given for the
alerts of the two dogs.
Dr Gerry McCann is on record as
stating, to a Portuguese interviewer: “I can tell you that we have also looked
at evidence about cadaver dogs and they are incredibly unreliable”. This statement contradicts the evidence from
many disciplines, not only searching for corpse scent and blood, but also
explosives, drugs (even being able to distinguish between different types of
explosive material and different drugs) and even medical conditions. Sniffer
dogs are used increasingly and to strikingly good effect in many fields in
countries all over the world.
By contrast, the settled view of
Dr Kate McCann, as set out on pages 249-50 of her book ‘madeleine’, is that the dogs
made ‘false’ alerts because of “the conscious or unconscious signals of the
handler”. This amounts to an attack on the professional integrity and judgment of Mr Grime and implies that
the dogs were ‘mistaken’ in all of their 17 alerts to corpse scent and blood.
In addition, In the days
immediately following leaks about the dogs’ findings, the McCanns and members of their family came up with a
series of bizarre and increasingly desperate explanations for them. These
included that any blood was from Madeleine having nosebleeds, or having
scratched herself when climbing the steps to the aircraft, or from mosquitoes
flying into the walls, or that any cadaver odour was due to carrying dirty
nappies or rotting meat in their hired car, or to Kate McCann’s clothes and the
soft toy, Cuddle cat, having been contaminated by her having visited six people
who had died in the fortnight before they left for their holiday.
There is no evidence that
Operation Grange has addressed these issues, though it has been supplied to
them with full references.
New research: A photograph, evidence of collusion, and other matters
During the nine years since Madeleine was reported missing, members of my
forum, and many others elsewhere, have added to the concerns about the possible
involvement of the McCanns in Madeleine’s disappearance. It would be impossible
in a short letter to even list all these concerns. They are all available for
the police to see on my forum and on many other places on the internet. I
will however mention just two significant matters.
The photographic evidence of
Madeleine’s presence in Praia da Luz on the McCanns’ holiday is confined to
just five photographs. Three of those five are genuine photographs taken on the
first day of their holiday, Saturday 28 April. A fourth, allegedly showing
Madeleine holding tennis balls on a tennis court in Praia da Luz, has been
claimed to have been taken by two different people and on two different days.
There are other aspects of that photograph that also cast doubt as to its true
provenance.
A fifth photograph, of Gerry
McCann sitting by a pool with his daughters Madeleine and Amelie, is claimed by
the McCanns to have been taken at 2.29pm on the day Madeleine was reported
missing. They have called it ‘The Last Photo’. However, evidence discussed on
my forum suggests that this key photograph may have been taken earlier in the
week, probably on the Sunday. There is no indication that Operation Grange has
addressed this evidence.
Second, there is the strange and striking correlation of two reports, made
respectively by Jane Tanner and Martin Smith, alleging they had seen a man
carrying a young child on the night of 3 May 2007, with a third report by a
Spanish ex-pat living in Germany Nuno Lourenco, in which he alleged that a
Portuguese holidaymaker, Wojchiech Krokowski, had tried to kidnap his own
daughter on Sunday 29 April. Nuno Lourenco’s statement can be shown to be
demonstrably false, yet his description of Krokowski is matched in almost every
detail by the descriptions of Jane Tanner and Martin Smith. In particular, each
of the three uses this meaningless phrase to describe the man: “He didn’t look
like a tourist”. These facts, prima facie, suggest collusion to promote
Krokowski as the likely abductor. This alleged collusion is clearly a matter
which should have been addressed by Operation Grange, but there is no evidence
that it has been.
These issues have been further
complicated by the former Investigation Officer of Operation Grange, Detective
Chief Inspector Andy Redwood, having claimed to a 7 million audience on BBC
Crimewatch on 14 October 2013 that the person seen by Jane Tanner had ‘come
forward’, six years later. We were told that he had been carrying his young
child home from the night creche, with no mention made of where the child’s
mother was. He was said to have been carrying his child in exactly the same way
as described by Jane Tanner, with no buggy, no blanket and only dressed in
pyjamas. It was dark and cold (13 deg C) at the time. The identity of this
person who had suddenly emerged after six years was not disclosed. In addition,
if he had been taking the route from the creche described by DCI Redwood, he
could not have been taking the shortest route to his apartment. For these
reasons and others, many people have real cause to doubt whether DCI Redwood
was being truthful.
Members of my forum and others have on many occasions submitted detailed
evidence to Operation Grange on these and other issues, but there is no
evidence that these lines of enquiry have been followed up.
The appointment of Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell as the
Senior Investigating Officer for Operation Grange
There is one other issue about the remit that has caused widespread concern,
and that is why former Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell was
chosen to head Operation Grange and allowed to set the remit. The action for
which Hamish Campbell is best known is having been the Investigating Officer
into the as-yet-unsolved murder of Jill Dando. His work on the case resulted in
an innocent man, Barry George/Bulsara, being wrongly jailed for eight years.
There were credible suggestions,
though never proved, that the conviction of Barry George was secured by a
member of the Metropolitan Police placing an amount of firearms residue,
matching the known weapon used to kill Jill Dando, in his coat pocket. Hamish
Campbell’s role in that utterly botched police investigation surely made him an
unsuitable choice to head up one of the most controversial and expensive
reviews and investigations undertaken by the Metropolitan Police.
The employment by the McCanns of wholly inappropriate private detection
agencies and individuals
I turn now to this aspect of Operation Grange’s remit:
“The focus of the review will be of the material held by three main
stakeholders (and in the following order of primacy);
The Portuguese Law Enforcement agencies.
UK Law Enforcement agencies,
Other private investigative
agencies/staff and organisations”.
I and my fellow members seriously question the designation of ‘other private
investigation agencies/staff’ as ‘stakeholders’. Clearly, what is mainly being
referred to here is the McCanns’ own private investigations. DCI Redwood made
it clear on a number of occasions that he regarded the McCanns’ own investigations
as being of real merit and interest. Pictures were seen in the British press of
his men collecting boxes of documentary material from the offices, in Barcelona, of Metodo 3,
one of the detective agencies used by
the McCanns. Two e-fits of a man
carrying a child said to have been seen by Mr Martin Smith and his family were
drawn up by Henri Exton, one of the investigators employed by the McCanns, in
the spring of 2008. These e-fits lay gathering dust until suddenly, on 14
October 2013, DCI Redwood produced them, saying that they were now “the centre
of Operation Grange’s focus”. These two examples demonstrate without question
that Operation Grange have relied to a considerable extent on the material
supplied by the various ‘other private investigation agencies/staff’.
However, we would seriously question whether they were right to do so, based on
all that is now known about the agencies and people involved in the McCanns’
private investigations, for which, as we know, they received very generous donations,
amounting to millions of pounds, from a generous British public.
In an
Appendix, I have provided a list of the main agencies and individuals that the
McCanns have employed as part of their private investigations, and what is
known about each. In summary, the two main private investigation agencies
employed by the McCanns during the first year, namely Metodo 3 and Oakley
International, were run by crooks.
A third private investigation team employed by
the McCanns was hailed in the press as ‘Alpha Investigations Group’ and
portrayed as a long-established private detective agency. It was also promoted
as consisting of a team of ‘top detectives’. But as set out in my Appendix, the
‘team’ turned out to be two retired, low-ranking detectives. It was a
deliberate deception, and a bogus company. ‘ALPHAIG Ltd’, was even formed to
try to hide the deception.
None of the individuals or agencies
used seem to have had any experience whatsoever of finding missing children or
adults. All have very dubious backgrounds and histories. I suggest that the
Metropolitan Police must have known this from the beginning, since at least
some of the facts I set out in the Appendix have been published in Britain’s
mainstream media, and in places on the
internet (including my own). How, therefore, in the light of the
extraordinary conduct of these agencies and individuals, could the Metropolitan Police possibly claim
that such material could assist in their investigations?
Given the appalling track record of
these agencies and individuals, may I respectfully suggest that much more light
will be shed on what really happened to Madeleine McCann if you begin with a
fresh police force and a fresh remit. Any new police force should then
interview under caution any U.K.
individuals who have worked for the McCanns (see the Appendix for a list of
names).
It would also be useful for any new
police force to interview former Metodo 3 employee, Julian Peribanez, who
worked on the Madeleine McCann case. Two years ago, he published a book which
contained a damning indictment of the corruption and criminality within Metodo
3. His claims amount to an accusation that Metodo 3 was, in effect, never
employed to search for Madeleine at all. This matches an account written by
Christie Twomey for The Times in
early 2008, in which she also made strong criticisms of Metodo 3 and two if its
staff.
The major
involvement of the government and the security services in supporting the
McCanns
As Prime Minister and the nation’s
Home Secretary from May 2010 to July 2016, you will know better than almost
anyone else about the extensive involvement of the government and the security
services ever since Madeleine McCann was reported missing. This has seemed to a
great many people to have been wholly disproportionate. Moreover, it has not
led to Madeleine being found nor to the arrest of anyone responsible for her
disappearance. I can only summarise here some of this high-level government
support:
1 Appointing, within days of
Madeleine’s reported disappearance, the Head of the government’s Media
Monitoring Unit, Clarence Mitchell, to be the McCanns’ public relations
spokesman, a post he held for nine years
2 The reported, successful efforts
of former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown to persuade the Portuguese police to
release the description of a possible abductor, based on the claims of the
McCanns’ friend Jane Tanner
3 The direct involvement of MI5, as
disclosed by Portuguese investigation co-ordinator Goncalo Amaral, in his book
‘The Truth of the Lie’
4 The role of the British Ambassador
in Portugal,
interfering with the Portuguese police who were trying to seize items for forensic testing from
the McCanns in the early days
5 Delays by the then Home Secretary
in 2007 and 2008 in processing requests by the Portuguese authorities for
rogatory interviews
6 The reported involvement of
Special Branch officers, who met with the McCanns at East
Midlands Airport
and drove them to their home the day they returned from Portugal
7 Setting up a top secret national co-ordinating
committee on the Madeleine McCann case on 8 May 2007, under the chairmanship of
the Head of Leicestershire Constabulary, Matt Baggott
8 The active involvement of the
government-backed Control Risks Group in the case from the very first days after
Madeleine was reported missing
9 Leicestershire Police officers
deliberately delaying sending relevant evidence to the Portuguese Police,
advising Jane Tanner ahead of an identity parade in which she purported to
identify Robert Murat as the person she had seen carrying a child the night
Madeleine was reported missing (leading to his arrest)
10 British criminal profilers
identifying Robert Murat as fitting the likely profile of the abductor to the
extent of 90% of likely characteristics
11 The former Prime Minister
acceding to a request made by his friend Rebekah Brooks, CEO of Rupert
Murdoch’s News International empire, to set up Operation Grange, reportedly
after threatening him with ‘a week of bad headlines about Theresa May’.
These are only examples of the
government’s heavy involvement in this case.
The
McCanns’ public appeal for funds
There are several issues regarding
the McCanns’ fund-raising efforts which do not appear to have been addressed by
Operation Grange at all. Some of these are set out in lengthy papers written by
qualified accountant, Enid O’Dowd, and can be read on the internet.
One issue is that the McCanns’ ‘Find
Madeleine Fund’ is a private trust and company and not a charity. Moreover, it
is quite clearly controlled by the McCanns and close members of their family
and friends, although to the public it appears to be a charity. Several contradictory statements have been
made by the McCanns and those backing them about the use to which the funds
have been put. Statements were made that funds would ‘only be used for the
search’. However, contrary statements have been made suggesting that
significant monies from the fund have been used to pay the McCanns’ legal fees
and costs.
A further concern was a reference in
a recent book to a statement made by Lord Bell of public relations firm Bell Pottinger - the
company brought in to the case by Mark Warner, the holiday firm through whom
the McCanns booked their holiday in Praia da Luz. He told a friend: “The
McCanns paid me £500,000 in fees to keep them on the front page of every single
newspaper for a year, which we did”. This raises the question of whether part
or all of this huge sum of money came from the donations from members of the
British public, who expected to see the money spent on a search for Madeleine, not a public relations exercise.
Apart from that, why has the
public’s money apparently been squandered on the ill-chosen agencies and
individuals employed by the McCanns, a responsibility also shared of course
with each one of the Directors of the Fund? How could it be, for example, that
the McCanns paid Kevin Halligen, said in newspaper articles to be a serial
fraudster, £500,000 plus expenses for four months’ work, during which he was
for most of the time living a 5-star life of luxury in hotels in Britain and the
U.S, with his girlfriend, Shirin Trachiotis? Does the public not need Operation
Grange, or others, to provide answers to these questions?
Several analyses of the accounts of
the ‘Find Madeleine Fund’ have been carried out by qualified Irish accountant
Enid O’Dowd. Her analyses are available at several places on the internet.
These analyses have uncovered many anomalies. On page 128 of her book,
‘madeleine’, Kate McCann wrote of the Find Madeleine Fund: “It was set up with great care and due diligence by
experts in the field. From the outset everyone agreed that, despite the costs
involved, it must be run to the highest standards of transparency”. However, the
accounts, every year, convey only the bare minimum to comply with the Companies
Acts. The public cannot gain from them anything like a clear picture of where
all their money has gone.
More recently, on 2
September 2015, the McCanns’ spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, said:: “They [the
McCanns] realise that [Operation Grange]
cannot go on forever. A newspaper report informed the public that
Mitchell had explained “how former GP Kate and heart doctor Gerry, both 37, of
Rothley, Leics., had moved money
from the
publicly-backed Find-Madeleine-Fund into
a special account in anticipation of
having to finance the hunt for their daughter themselves". The
public, when they gave money to the Find Madeleine Fund, would not expect the
Directors to then create a separate fund, which was reported as being controlled
just by the McCanns.
An analysis
of the case by PeterMac, a retired Police Superintendent, and other
evidence submitted by members of my forum
PeterMac, a retired Police
Superintendent, has studied the Madeleine McCann case for nine years, and conducted original research on key
evidential issues in the case. I am aware that he has submitted a great deal of
evidence to the respective Senior Investigating Officers, always obtaining a
receipt for the information he has sent them.
His analysis, which by implication is highly critical of Operation
Grange, has been presented in a free e-book which can now be read at this link:
It has also been reproduced on my
websites, here:
Other members of my forum have also
submitted evidence and have been assured verbally and in writing that all the
evidence they have submitted is being kept on computer and has been taken into
consideration. It will therefore be available for any fresh police force, not
bound by a restricted remit, to investigate.
What should
happen now
I have set out the case that
Operation Grange has not succeeded in its search for the truth because of its
inappropriately limited remit. I have also referred to justified criticisms
about the operation of the Find Madeleine Fund.
Despite impressive statistics
released from time to time of the numbers of documents studied, lines of
enquiry pursued, rogatory requests submitted, numbers of suspects or persons of
interest questioned, etc., it seems plain that after well over six years,
Operation Grange is nowhere nearer to solving
this case.
Despite
promises of ‘openness’ and ‘transparency’, there is no evidence made available
to the public which demonstrates that any of the above issues I have listed has
been fully investigated (if at all) and what (if any) the findings were.
You will be aware that
thousands of people, among them professionals such as police officers, criminal
profilers, criminologists, doctors, psychiatrists and statement analysts, have
questioned the McCanns’ account of events.
You may
recall that at the recent Police Federation Conference, you addressed the issue
of widespread corruption in British police forces and the need to tackle it. It
cannot simply be assumed that Operation Grange is free from corrupt influences.At the same time, we have
seen in the press over recent years many accounts of senior-level police
corruption in the Metropolitan Police force.
On behalf of the members of my
forum, therefore, I call on you to:
1.
Appoint independent assessors of proven integrity and
independence to evaluate the work of Operation Grange, and make its findings
public. In this respect, may I remind you of this part of the review’s remit,
as determined by DCS Hamish Campbell: “The ‘investigative review’ will
be conducted with transparency, openness and thoroughness…” Any such report must
include a full investigation into the huge involvement in this case of MI5,
Special Branch and other government or
government-backed security agencies;
2.
Appoint, via the new Home Secretary, a different police
force, which has the highest possible reputation for integrity and
independence, to investigate the reported disappearance of Madeleine McCann;
3. Ensure that any new
police investigation has an unlimited remit and can therefore go to wherever the evidence leads them;
4.
Order the relevant government department to investigate all
aspects of the operation of the Find Madeleine Fund, including
investigating
the actions of all of its Directors,
the
funding of the private investigations,
whether
or not funds have been used to pay the McCanns’ legal fees and expenses,
why it was necessary for
a separate account to be set up last year, to be controlled by the McCanns and
not the Directors, and
accounting for all monies
paid into and from the Find Madeleine Fund since it was set up in May
2007..
I shall send the same letter to Sir
Bernard Hogan-Howe but I urge you to seek an urgent meeting with him to discuss
the contents of my letter. Please give this matter your most careful
consideration and I shall look forward to your response in the near future.
Yours sincerely
_______________________
Jill Havern
For and on behalf of the members of
‘The Complete Mystery of Madeleine McCann’
APPENDIX: The backgrounds and histories of agencies and individuals who
were employed by the McCanns and the Directors of the ‘Find Madeleine Fund’
in their ‘Search for Madeleine’
Below are
listed the main agencies and individuals employed by the McCann Team, in the
approximate order in which they were appointed. The details given are by no
means a complete record of these matters, which clearly illustrate the
unsuitability of all of them to search for a missing child:
1 Brian Kennedy
2 Gary Hagland
3 Metodo 3
4 Francisco Marco
5 Antonio Gimenez Raso
6 Julian Peribanez
7 Marcos Aragao Correia
8 Oakley International
9 Kevin Halligen
10 Henri Exton
11 Tim Craig-Harvey
12 ALPHAIG
13 Former Detective Inspector Dave Edgar
14 Former Detective Sergeant Arthur Cowley
15 Melissa Little
Brian Kennedy
Brian
Kennedy has been the acknowledged head of the McCanns’ private
investigations since September 2007, possibly
even before then. He must take personal responsibility therefore for the appointment
of all the other 14 agencies and individuals listed above.
I refer
now to an article by Mark Hollingsworth in the Evening Standard in August 2009, which discusses the McCanns’
private investigation. Here is part of it, quote:
“Kennedy
hired Metodo 3, an agency based in Barcelona,
on a six-month contract and paid it an estimated £50,000 a month. Metodo 3 was
hired because of Spain’s
‘language and cultural connection’ with Portugal. ‘If we’d had big-booted
Brits or, heaven forbid, Americans, we would have had doors slammed in our
faces’ said Clarence Mitchell, spokesperson for the McCann’s at the time. ‘And
it’s quite likely that we could have been charged with hindering the
investigation as technically it’s illegal in Portugal to undertake a secondary
investigation.
The agency had 35 investigators working on the case in Britain, France,
Spain, Portugal and Morocco. A hotline was set up for
the public to report sightings and suspicions, and the search focussed on Morocco. But
the investigation was dogged by over-confidence and braggadocio. ‘We know who
took Madeleine and hope she will be home by Christmas,’ boasted Metodo 3’s
flamboyant boss Francisco Marco. But no Madeleine materialised and their
contract was not renewed.
Until now, few details have emerged about the private investigation during
those crucial early months, but an investigation by the Evening Standard shows that key mistakes were made, which in turn
made later enquiries far more challenging.
The Evening Standard has spoken to several
sources close to the private investigations that took place in the first year
and discovered that:
* The
involvement of Brian Kennedy and his son Patrick in the operation was
counter-productive, notably when they were questioned by the local police for
acting suspiciously while attempting a 24-hour ‘stake out’.
* The
relationship between Metodo 3 and the Portuguese police had completely broken
down.
* Key witnesses were questioned far too
aggressively, so much so that some of them later refused to talk to the police.
* Many of
the investigators had little experience of the required painstaking forensic
detective work”.
These
were very serious allegations. The most serious by far was the claim that Brian
Kennedy’s men had intimidated potential witnesses into silence.
I must
also refer to what at the time was a secret meeting held on 13 November 2007
between Brian Kennedy and the first and chief suspect at the time, Robert
Murat.
This was a highly irregular meeting between the man investigating Madeleine’s
disappearance for the McCanns (Brian Kennedy) and the original suspect in the
case (Robert Murat). Present at the meeting, held in the Portugal home of
Robert Murat’s aunt and uncle, Ralph and Sally Eveleigh, were: Kennedy and the
McCanns’ co-ordinating Solicitor (and since 2009 a Director of the Find
Madeleine Fund), Edward Smethurst, and Robert Murat, his mother, aunt and uncle
and Murat’s lawyer, Francisco Pagarete. It was therefore a meeting between top
legal representatives of the three main suspects in the case. When, a fortnight
later, news of the meeting was leaked to the Portuguese press, Kennedy claimed
he had met Murat simply ‘to offer him a job looking for Madeleine’. These facts
suggest that Operation Grange should have investigated what the real reason was
for this meeting.
Gary Hagland He was employed by Cheshire businessman Brian Kennedy, who led
the series of private investigations conducted by the McCanns and the Directors
of the McCanns’ ‘Find Madeleine Fund’. He worked for him, according to
statements of his that I have seen, from around September 2007 to March/April
2008, and was based in a house bought by Brian Kennedy for the investigation in
Knutsford, Cheshire.
He had no qualifications or experience in looking for missing children. His
only qualification appears to be in money laundering legislation. An article
was written by him in 1993, published in the Journal of Financial
Regulation and Compliance. Accompanying this abstract is a brief description of
the author, Gary Hagland, which states: ““Gary Hagland, AMSI MIMgt, entered the
fledgling area of compliance in 1985 after leaving the Royal Hong Kong Police
where he had served in criminal intelligence for some six years”. In addition,
Hagland has written a book, under the pen name ‘Mason Horsburgh’, titled ‘UFO:
A Saucer full of Secrets’, in which he describes encounters with aliens and
flying saucers, including a rapid trip around the planets to beyond Saturn and
back. He is also on record, in writing, as having deep reservations about the
work he was employed to do for the McCanns, and claims that he was fired by
Brian Kennedy after he told him face-to-face that his investigation was
‘heading in the wrong direction’. He has written an as-yet-unpublished book about
his experiences working for the McCanns.
Metodo 3 Metodo 3 was the Barcelona-based private
detective agency used by the McCanns as their lead investigators from September
2007 to April 2008. Despite obvious problems surrounding this firm of detectives,
the McCann Team continued to use them until at least March 2009. The firm had
an extremely poor reputation in Barcelona.
Journalist Christine Twomey from The
Times interviewed its Director and a colleague in early 2008 and also came
away with a strong impression that Metodo 3 was very far from being the
reputable agency that the McCanns claimed it to be. Metodo 3 had previously
been investigated by Spanish police over persistent allegations that they were
involved in systematic illegal telephone tapping, and several of its staff were
questioned by police. The firm was later involved in another scandal over
government contracts for ‘research’ work. But, instead, they produced useless,
bogus reports. In 2014 the firm eventually went out of business when they were
again found to have been conducting illegal telephone recordings of
conversations between major Catalonian politicians.
Francisco Marco Marco was the Director of Metodo 3 at the
time of Madeleine’s disappearance and remained so until the recent closure of
Metodo 3. In the run-up to Christmas 2007, Marco lied on several occasions,
making these wild and untrue claims which were widely reported in the British
press: ‘Madeleine is alive’, ‘We know where she is’, and ‘Our men are closing
in on the kidnappers’. This led to dramatic headlines in the British press:
‘Maddie will be home by Christmas’. Despite this succession of outright lies,
the McCanns continued to employ his services for at least another 15 months. In
2013 he was at the centre of an operation to illegally record conversations of
top politicians in a Barcelona
restaurant. He was arrested and charged.
Antonio Gimenez Raso Antonio Gimenez Raso was one of Metodo 3’s
leading investigators on the Madeleine McCann case, from September 2007 to 17
February 2008. On that date he was arrested and remanded in custody on very
serious drugs charges. It was alleged that, back in 2004, when he was working
as a Drugs and Trafficking Inspector for the Catalonian Regional Police, he had
supplied information about a stash of 25 kilos of cocaine, worth millions of
pounds, on a boat in Barcelona
harbour, enabling a criminal gang to steal it. This gang was later described by
a Barcelona
judge as ‘a 27-strong vicious gang that practiced exceptional violence’. Headlines in the British, Spanish and Portuguese press
on 18 February 2008 stated unequivocally that Gimenez Raso was ‘One of the
investigators employed by the McCanns’, a fact that has since been confirmed. Yet the McCanns’ spokesman, Clarence
Mitchell, issued an immediate, flat denial, claiming: ‘Gimenez Raso is not one
of our men’. After four years in custody, Gimenez Raso was found ‘Not Guilty’
because of insufficient proof that he had supplied information to the gang,
but, in acquitting him, the judge told him that the evidence had revealed that
“You became much too close to the members of this gang”. It was also revealed
that in late 2004 Gimenez Raso had ‘left’ his senior post in the police’s Drugs
and Trafficking Department, though whether he was sacked or simply resigned is
unclear (see also below under Marcos Aragao Correia).
Gimenez
Raso was also central to persistent allegations that members of the McCann Team
and British journalists were offering money to people in Morocco in exchange
for stories claiming that they might have had a ‘sighting’ of girls who looked
like Madeleine McCann. According to one media report: “Antonio Gimenez Raso had travelled to Morocco and,
whilst he was there, was able - somehow - to find a number of witnesses who
claimed to have seen Madeleine. It was around the time of Gimenez’s trip to Morocco that the Moroccan government took the
unusual step of expelling a man who had been visiting hotels and garages in
various parts of Morocco
offering people money if they could claim to have seen a girl looking like
Madeleine.
At
the Leveson enquiry, David Pilditch, lead journalist for the Daily Express covering the Madeleine McCann case, admitted
on oath paying at least one witness money in return for claims of a ‘sighting’.
Additionally, Sunday Express reporter James Murray and Express
photographer Mike Gunnill were
accurately reported to have “driven from Portugal
to the southern Spanish port of Tarifa, across to Tangiers, then boarded the train to
Marrakech via Casablanca”.
There, they had “visited contacts at locations in Marrakech”. Gimenez Raso was
known to have been in the area at that time. In addition, Paulo Reis from the GazetaDigital site reported that “The Moroccan authorities expelled a
British citizen a few days ago, after he contacted staff from a gas station
near the city of Marrakesh.
A source from ‘Sureté Nacionale’, Moroccan security and intelligence services,
confirmed that the British citizen offered a large amount of money to several
employees, in exchange for specific statements about a sighting concerning a
blonde girl. The British Embassy in Morocco, contacted by SOS
Madeleine, refused to comment. The possibility of having private detectives
working in their country was referred, by the same source, as “an offence and a
violation of national sovereignty”. These are matters that should be fully
investigated, given that there were indeed numerous claimed ‘sightings’ of
Madeleine in Morocco, none of which were true.
Julian Peribanez Julian Peribanez was another employee of Metodo 3 who worked on the Madeleine McCann case. He can be seen in a video uploaded to YouTube walking alongside Cheshire businessman Brian Kennedy, whilst trying to hide his face from the cameras. He was still working for Metodo 3 in 2013 when the scandal of the illegal recordings of politicians in a Barcelona restaurant was exposed. Arrested, he soon admitted his guilt and gave evidence against his boss Francisco Marco to the police on how the illegal recordings operation had been carried out. In 2014, Julian Peribanez wrote a book on his experiences with Metodo 3 in which he gave chapter and verse on a host of illegal activities, scams and frauds carried out by the firm over many years, including in the case of Madeleine McCann. Members of my forum obtained a copy of his book and paid for the translation of the chapter he wrote on the Madeleine McCann case into English. It can be read on my website, here:
.
It
has already had nearly 8,000 views on my forum. Peribanez makes the following
statements about Metodo 3.
1 Initially Metodo 3 worked closely with Brian Kennedy and money-laundering expert Gary Hagland, who Peribanez met at least twice.
2 He and a Metodo 3 colleague, Antonio Tamarit, worked in close contact with the British government-backed security firm, Control Risks Group.
3 There was a meeting in Manchester in early 2008 between Brian Kennedy and Marita Fernandes, the mother of the head of Metodo 3 (Francisco Marco) and José Luis Marco Llavina, her nephew, who was Metodo 3’s accountant.
4Tamarit says of these two: “[Neither] had carried out any investigative work for many years…they made a fortune by means of deception and dishonest trickery…Metodo 3 was swindling [Madeleine’s Fund, with] inflated expenses, invented items, false invoices, etc.”
5 Specific information is given: “Francisco Marco…obtained some El Corte Inglés travel invoices and subsequently falsified them by changing the details”.
Peribanez adds that the claims made by Metodo 3 that they had either 20, or even 40, people working on the Madeleine McCann investigation were outright lies. He says there were only ever three. He adds that Francisco’s claims of having ‘a bank of multilingual telephonists to staff the telephone hotline’ were also ‘bogus’.
Marcos Aragao Correia Marcos Correia was a lawyer from the island of Madeira who played a very significant
role in supporting the McCanns, although the McCanns never conceded this fact.
We do, however, have multiple evidences from Correia himself that he was
directly instructed in his activities at all times by Brian Kennedy, on behalf
of the McCanns. He was engaged by them on two main tasks. One was to act as the
lawyer representing convicted murderess Leonor Cipriano in a criminal complaint
by her against Goncalo Amaral, the co-ordinator of the Madeleine McCann
investigation until 2 October 2007. The other was to search the Arade Dam for
Madeleine’s bones.
Leonor Cipriano and her brother were convicted in
2005 of murdering Ms Cipriano’s 8-year-old daughter, Joana, having originally
reported her missing. The murder was especially brutal and each received
16-year jail sentences. In unusual circumstances, Marcos Correia visited Ms
Cipriano in Odemira Women’s Prison on 8 April 2008 and replaced her existing
lawyer. Mr Correia then pursued, on
behalf of the McCanns, a legal action by Ms Cipriano against Mr Amaral
and four other detectives, accusing them of having tortured her into making a
false confession. The charges of torture were dismissed but, in a decision
which baffled legal experts, Amaral was found guilty of ‘filing a false report’
and handed a suspended prison sentence.
Still more controversially, Correia worked with
Metodo 3 to plan searches for Madeleine’s bones on the Arade Dam, Portugal. As he
has personally testified, he met Metodo 3 detectives - Director Francisco Marco
and another, probably Antonio Gimenez Raso (see above) - at the Arade Dam on 10
December 2007. Both men had been instructed to meet each other by Brian
Kennedy, on behalf of the McCanns. It was a remarkable and expensive meeting.
Correia would have had to travel over 600 miles from Madeira, and another 600
back, for the meeting and Marco and Gimenez Raso would have travelled a similar
distance from their base in Barcelona.
Just seven weeks after this unusual meeting, British
and Portuguese newspapers reported dramatic news that a ‘Good Samaritan’,
namely Marcos Correia, had begun a gruesome, week-long search for Madeleine’s
bones. He claimed he was doing this out of the goodness of his heart, and his
own pocket, because he had received intelligence from Portugal’s
criminal underworld that her body had been thrown into a lake. He claimed he
had worked out which lake it was. He undertook a further week-long search five
weeks later, in early March 2008. Nothing of interest was found, but,
significantly, he handed his findings not to the Portuguese police, as he
should have done, but to Metodo 3 investigators.
Statements made by and on behalf of the McCanns
suggested that they had known nothing of these planned searches of the dam. But
it was clear that they must have done, having put their private investigations
into the hands of Brian Kennedy, who in turn employed Correia and the Metodo 3
investigators, who held that significant meeting at the Arade Dam on 10
December 2007.
Only after the two week-long searches did some
significant facts emerge about Marcos Correia. First, he admitted, eventually,
that he had been paid by Brian Kennedy both to prosecute the Madeleine McCann
investigator, Goncalo Amaral, in the criminal courts, and to carry out the two
bogus searches of the Arade Dam. It also emerged that he had given two entirely
different versions of how he came to take an interest in the Madeleine McCann
case.
His initial claim was that underworld sources had
told him that Madeleine had been abducted by a paedophile gang, raped, killed
and then her body thrown into ‘a murky lake’. He said he had then used
‘visions’ and maps to locate where the gang probably threw the body. He later
admitted that this was a complete fabrication, and proceeded to give another
version of how his interest in Madeleine McCann had arisen. This time, he said
that on Saturday 5 May, just two days after Madeleine had been reported
missing, he had been to his first-ever Spiritualist church meeting, on the
island of Madeira where he lived. On returning home, he said, he had had a
vision of a big, powerful man strangling a young blonde girl. Soon afterwards, he
claimed, he had heard about the reported disappearance of Madeleine McCann,
connected this with his vision, and decided to offer his help to the police and
the McCanns. Sometime later, he admitted that this story, too, was a total
fabrication.
Later still, interviewed by a Portuguese
journalist about his boasts about being a medium and a visionary, he made this
claim (quote): “Metodo 3 submitted me to a test in order to prove beyond all doubt whether
or not my mediumistic abilities and my accounts were credible. They were
fed up with following false leads. The fact is that the test gave totally
positive results, according to what was confirmed to me personally by the
Director of Método 3 in Barcelona himself.
Following my mediumistic abilities passing Metodo 3’s stringent tests, Metodo 3 offered full support to my
research”.
Oakley International In April 2008, the McCanns replaced Metodo
3 as their lead investigators by a firm called Oakley International. This news
was revealed around four months later, in August, when sources close to the
McCanns claimed that Oakley International were ‘the big boys’ of international
private detection’, based in the United States. On 13 August 2008, the Daily Mail reported: “Kate and Gerry McCann
have hired a team of crack U.S detectives to lead the hunt for their missing
daughter Madeleine, it has emerged. The unnamed US firm is said to have been
offered a £500,000 six-month contract by the Find Madeleine Fund to help
spearhead the search. A friend of the McCanns said: 'The hunt for Madeleine is
becoming more and more international and it was felt that a truly international
firm was now needed to lead the inquiry. These really are the big boys. They
are absolutely the best, but they are extremely secretive and cloak-and-dagger
about what they do. Since their appointment, Metodo has very much taken a back
seat and they are now concentrating primarily in Portugal
and Spain and across the
Straits of Gibraltar…' The American agency is
pretty much handling everything else.' The secretive firm is said to employ
ex-FBI, CIA and U.S special forces, according to the Daily Mirror.
These
claims, however, were completely false - see below.
Kevin Halligen Kevin Halligen, an Irishman born in Dublin, but who had followed a career in England for
many years, specialising in his knowledge of lithium batteries, was the founder
of Oakley International. On investigation, this company turned out to be merely
a one-man-band company, registered by Halligen. Significantly, it had been
registered in June 2007, only after Madeleine had been reported
missing. It was nothing like ‘the big boys of international private detection’
claimed by McCann sources. It was, in effect, a bogus sole trader company in
which Halligen employed a couple of his cronies.
In
October 2009, after Kevin Halligen had gone on the run from police, who wanted
him in connection with an alleged serious fraud committed in the United States.
He was eventually arrested by British police after being found holed up with his
girlfriend, Shirin Trachiotis, in the £700-a-night Bank Hotel, Oxford. He was taken immediately to Belmarsh
top security prison. There, he spent three years fighting what was, ultimately,
an unsuccessful legal battle to avoid extradition to the U.S. In the U.S. he was
convicted of a fraud totalling around $1.5 million and was handed a four-year
jail sentence.
Prior
to his arrest, Halligen’s shocking activities whilst working for the McCanns
had been revealed in a highly illuminating article by Mark Hollingsworth in the
Evening Standard in August 2009. This
article noted that the original contract with Kevin Halligen might have been
with Kevin Halligen’s company ‘Red Defence International’, but the media
reported that it was Oakley International with whom the contract was made.
Because of the secrecy surrounding the McCann case, it is impossible to know
which, if either, is true. I will quote directly from Mark Hollingsworth’s
article:
QUOTES:
“Kevin Halligen [was] a smooth-talking Irishman who claimed to have worked for
covert British government intelligence agency GCHQ Halligen [and his friend
Henri Exton] were for hire for a fee of £100,000 per month plus expenses”.
.
“Halligen…has been described as a ‘Walter Mitty figure’. He used false names to
collect prospective clients at airports in order to preserve secrecy, and he
called himself ‘Kevin’ or ‘Richard’ or ‘Patrick’ at different times to describe
himself to business contacts…He is obsessed by surveillance gadgets and even
installed a covert camera to spy on his own employees. He claimed to have
worked for GCHQ, but in fact he was employed by the Atomic Energy Authority as
head of defence systems in the field of new information technology…”
“Halligen
has a degree in electronics [and] worked on the fringes of the intelligence
community...After leaving the AEA, Halligen set up Red Defence International
Ltd as an international security and political risk company, advising clients
on the risks involved in investing and doing business in unstable, war-torn and
corrupt countries…In 2006, he struck gold when hired by Trafigura, the Dutch
commodities trading company. Executives were imprisoned in the Ivory Coast after toxic waste was dumped in
landfills near its biggest city Abidjan.
Trafigura was blamed and hired Red Defence International at vast expense to
help with the negotiations to release its executives. A Falcon business jet was
rented for several months during the operation and it was Halligen’s first
taste of the good life. The case only ended when Trafigura paid $197 million to
the government of the Ivory
Coast to secure the release of the
prisoners. Halligen made a fortune from Trafigura and was suddenly flying
everywhere first-class, staying at the Lansborough and Stafford hotels in London and The Willard hotel in Washington DC
for months at a time. In 2007 he set up Oakley International Group and
registered at the offices of the prestigious law firm Patton Boggs, in Washington DC,
as an international security company. He was now strutting the stage as a
self-proclaimed international spy expert and joined the Special Forces Club in
Knightsbridge, where he met Exton”.
“During
the Madeleine investigation, Halligen spent vast amounts of time in the
HeyJo bar in the basement of the Abracadabra Club near his Jermyn Street office. Armed with a clutch
of unregistered mobile phones and a Blackberry, the bar was in effect his
office. ‘He was there virtually the whole day,’ a former colleague told the Evening Standard: ‘He had an amazing
tolerance for alcohol…When not imbibing in St James’s, Halligen was in the United States,
trying to drum up investors for Oakley International. On 15 August 2008, at the
height of the McCann investigation crisis, he persuaded Andre Hollis, a former
US Drug enforcement agency official, to write out an $80,000 cheque to Oakley
in return for a ten per cent share-holding. The money was then transferred into
the private accounts of Halligen and his girlfriend Shirin Trachiotis to
finance a holiday in Italy,
according to Hollis. In a $6 million lawsuit filed in Fairfax County, Virginia,
Hollis alleges that Halligen ‘received monies for Oakley’s services rendered
and deposited the same into his personal accounts’ and ‘repeatedly and
systematically depleted funds from Oakley’s bank accounts for inappropriate
personal expenses’. Hollis was not the only victim. Mark Aspinall, a respected
lawyer who worked closely with Halligen, invested £500,000 in Oakley and lost
the lot. Earlier this year he filed a lawsuit in Washington DC
against Halligen claiming $1.4 million in damages. The finances of Oakley
International are in chaos and numerous employees, specialist consultants and
contractors have not been paid. Some of them now face financial ruin”.
“…by mid-August 2008, Kennedy and Gerry McCann were increasingly concerned by
an absence of details of how the money was being spent. At one meeting,
Halligen was asked how many men constituted a surveillance team and he produced
a piece of paper on which he wrote ‘between one and ten’. But he then refused
to say how many were working and how much they were being paid…Halligen was
charging very high rates and expenses….eyebrows were raised when all the money
was paid to Oakley International, solely owned and managed by Halligen. One
invoice, seen by the Evening Standard,
shows that for ‘accrued expenses to May 5, 2008’ (just one month into the
contract), Oakley charged $74,155. The ‘point of contact’ was Halligen who
provided a UK
mobile telephone number”.
“The
contract [with Brian Kennedy] was terminated by the end of September 2008,
after £500,000, plus expenses, had been spent. Halligen has gone into hiding,
leaving a trail of debt and numerous former business associates and creditors
looking for him. He was last seen in January of this year in Rome, drinking and spending prodigiously at
the Hilton Cavalieri and Excelsior hotels…“
Henri Exton As can be seen above, Exton is or was an
associate of Kevin Halligen. It appears that Halligen employed him on his
ill-fated Madeleine McCann investigation. Mark Hollingsworth wrote this about
him in the 2009 Evening Standard
article quoted above:
“Exton had been an undercover officer for the Manchester police. A maverick…figure, he
successfully infiltrated gangs of football hooligans in the 1980s…In 1991 he
was seconded to work on MI5 undercover operations against drug dealers,
gangsters and terrorists…But in November 2002, the stress appeared to have
overcome his judgment when he was arrested for shoplifting. While working on an
MI5 surveillance, Exton was caught leaving a tax-free shopping area at Manchester airport with a
bottle of perfume he had not paid for. The police were called and he was given
the option of the offence being dealt with under caution or to face
prosecution. He chose a police caution and so in effect admitted his guilt”.
In the
BBC Crimewatch McCann special shown on 14 October 2013, two e-fits of
different-looking men were shown to viewers, who were told by the Head of
Operation Grange, Detective Chief Inspector Andy Redwood, that the man
represented by these two very different e-fits was ‘the centre of our focus’.
It was said that these two e-fits were drawn up by two members of the family of
Martin Smith, from Drogheda,
Ireland.
However, there are major doubts about the reliability of the sighting claimed
by the family. The e-fits were produced by Exton in the spring of 2008 and
shown to the McCanns. The McCanns say that ‘by October 2009’ they had shown
these e-fits to Leicestershire Police and the Portuguese police, yet nothing
was done about them until the Crimewatch show of October in 2014. Undoubtedly
there is a great mystery about Exton’s role in producing those two puzzling
e-fits.
Tim Craig-Harvey Tim Craig-Harvey was another close associate
of Kevin Halligen; both had close connections with government security
services. Little was known about his role in the Madeleine McCann case until he
appeared in a Channel 5 film about the case in early 2014. Research since then
has revealed that Tim Craig-Harvey was involved in the formation and running of
a number of companies associated with Kevin Halligen. Both had close associates
in common. Given what we now know about Kevin Halligen’s history and modus
operandi, there must clearly also be major question marks about precisely why
Craig-Harvey got involved in the Madeleine McCann case.
ALPHAIG In March 2009, shortly before a Channel 4
documentary made by Mentorn Media about the reported disappearance of Madeleine
McCann, shown in May that year, stories began to appear in the print and TV
media about a new company said to have been engaged by the McCann Team to find
Madeleine. The press referred to it as ‘Alpha Investigations Group’. A number
of reports suggested the following: (a) that it was a well-established and
reputable detective agency and (b) that the ‘head’ of this agency was either
retired Detective Inspector Dave Edgar, or him and a colleague, retired
Detective Sergeant Arthur Cowley. Neither was true.
In
fact, subsequent analysis by Madeleine McCann researchers unearthed these
facts:
1) Dave Edgar was appointed independently by Brian
Kennedy
2) So was Arthur Cowley
3) There was and never had been any company called
‘Alpha Investigations Group’, and
4) Instead, a bogus company, ALPHAIG, had been set up
to give the false impression that there really was a company called Alpha
Investigations Group.
The
researchers also unearthed the following facts:
A. Only
after Edgar and Cowley had been working for the McCann Team for months did
the head of the McCann Team’s private investigation, Brian Kennedy, set up a
one-man-band company, ALPHAIG, in the name of Arthur Cowley, the sole Director.
That occurred on 10 June 2009.
B. One
of Kennedy’s friends and business associates, Andrew Dickman, two days later, also
registered an internet domain in the name of ALPHAIG - but it was never used.
C. ALPHAIG
never traded.
D. Only
one set of accounts was ever produced and it showed no evidence of any business
being done.
E. The
registered office was Cowley’s home - a hilltop cottage 1,000 feet up on Halkyn Mountain
in north Wales.
F. It
was never the base for any detective agency.
G. ALPHAIG
never had a website.
H. ALPHAIG
never had any offices.
I.
ALPHAIG never advertised.
J. ALHAIG
ceased to exist in 2011.
K. Sometime
after it ceased to exist, Arthur Cowley spoke to a journalist and told him that
he held ‘secrets’ about the Madeleine McCann case that he was not prepared to
disclose and would ‘take to my grave’.
It
appears, therefore, that ALPHAIG was only registered as a company to give a
wholly misleading impression to the media and the public. ALPHAIG was a dummy
company. Neither Dave Edgar nor Arthur Cowley was employed by, or running, a
company called Alpha Investigations Group, nor had they been running any
detective agency at all, let alone a well-established one.
The media
were deceived. Brian Kennedy appears to have been responsible for this
misleading impression being given. He personally appointed Dave Edgar. He
appointed Arthur Cowley as well. One of Brian Kennedy’s long-time friends and
contacts registered a domain name for ALPHAIG.
Former Detective Inspector Dave Edgar In his August 2009
article for the Evening Standard,
Mark Hollingsworth wrote this about a press conference organised by the
McCanns’ spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, and Dave Edgar, earlier that month:
“It was
billed as a ‘significant development’ in the exhaustive search for Madeleine
McCann. At a recent dramatic press conference in London, the lead private
investigator David Edgar, a retired Cheshire detective inspector, brandished an
e-fit image of an Australian woman, described her as ‘a bit of a Victoria
Beckham lookalike’, and appealed for help in tracing her. The woman was seen
‘looking agitated’ outside a restaurant in Barcelona three days after Madeleine’s
disappearance. ‘It is a strong lead’, said Edgar, wearing a pin-stripe suit in
front of a bank of cameras and microphones. ‘Madeleine could have been in Barcelona by that point.
The fact the conversation took place near the marina could be significant.’
But, within days, reporters discovered that the private detectives had failed
to make the most basic enquiries before announcing their potential breakthrough.
Members of Edgar’s team who visited Barcelona
had failed
to speak to anyone working at the restaurant near where the agitated
woman was seen that night, neglected to ask if the mystery
woman had been filmed on CCTV cameras and knew nothing about the arrival of an
Australian luxury yacht just after Madeleine vanished”.
Little is known about the career of Dave Edgar,
except that he worked in Northern Ireland for a substantial period, One thing
about the press conference that Mark Hollingsworth failed to mention was that
during it, Edgar claimed that the McCanns’ friend Jane Tanner, who maintained
that she had seen a man carrying a child at about 9.15pm on the evening
Madeleine was reported missing, might actually have seen a woman, not a man. This
seemed to fit in with the narrative about a woman seen on Barcelona docks that Clarence Mitchell and
Dave Edgar were trying to convey to the media. But it made a nonsense of the
detailed description she had given on 4 May 2007 (the day after Madeleine was
reported missing) of a man.
He
also made strange pronouncements about what he thought had happened to
Madeleine, often based on a range of media stories. To give one example, in
September 2009 he developed the strongly-held belief, published in at least two
newspapers, that Madeleine was being held alive in an underground lair within a
few miles of Praia da Luz. There was absolutely no evidence of this. Despite this ‘firm’ belief of Edgar’s, the
McCann Team did nothing to follow up this apparently sincerely-held conviction. It appeared that the only basis
for this hypothesis was that the media had reported a few weeks before on the
case of Jaycee Lee Dugard, an 11-year-old girl who was abducted in 1991 but was
found alive 18 years later, in the summer of 2009. Edgar’s claim that he
believed Madeleine was being hidden in a lair on the Algarve coast was fairly obviously
for media consumption - to capitalise, as it were, on the publicity surrounding
Jaycee Lee Dugard - and was never a genuine line of enquiry.
.
.
Former Detective Sergeant Arthur Cowley I have covered his limited role in the McCann Team’s private investigation above. I
have indicated that the evidence
suggests that he was not running a company called ALPHAIG, but merely
agreed with his employer, Brian
Kennedy’s plan to make it look as
though he and Dave Edgar were running along-established business called
Alpha Investigations Group.
Melissa Little Melissa Little was not,
strictly speaking, one of the McCann Team’s investigators. She was hailed by
the McCann Team as an ‘F.B.I.--trained forensic artist’, which sounded highly
impressive. Her main role in the private Madeleine McCann investigation was to
produce two sketches of alleged suspects. One of them, of the man supposedly
seen by Jane Tanner at 9.15pm on the night Madeleine was reported missing, was
produced on 25 October 2007 - nearly six months after Madeleine had been
reported missing. There was no obvious reason why the McCann Team took so long
to release this sketch. It was of very little, if any, value, so long after the
event. Moreover, Jane Tanner’s description has changed over time in significant
respects. Moreover, Jane Tanner said she had not seen any of the man’s
face.
Brian
Kennedy, some weeks later, asked Melissa Little to produce another sketch for him.
This time it was of a moustachoied man, with long, straggly hair, said by the
McCann Team to be a suspect. It was based on a sighting by a Ms Gail Cooper of
a suspicious-looking charity collector she had seen in Praia da Luz. The McCann Team publicised this sketch, with
the help of Leicestershire Police and the News
of the World, on 20 January 2008. The man became known by many who saw the
sketch as ‘George Harrison man’ or ‘Monsterman’. The sketch was based on
reports of this man submitted privately to the McCann Team and not
to the Portuguese police. One of the curious features of this second drawing by
Melissa Little is that it bore a passing resemblance to the earlier one she had
drawn based upon Jane Tanner’s claims. Jane Tanner even made a statement that
she was ‘60% to 80% sure’ that the person she had seen and ‘Monsterman’ were
one and the same. This wholly lacked credibility as she admitted that she had
seen no part of the face of the man she said she had seen.
Paulo Reis, a Portuguese researcher into the Madeleine McCann case, made some important observations, on the ‘GazetaDigital’ website, on Melissa Little’s two sketches. He referred to a Powerpoint demonstration produced by the McCanns and sent to the Portuguese police and Leicestershire Police in advance of the news report in the News of the World. He noted these points:
Although Jane Tanner had not seen the face of the man she claimed to have seen on 3 May, and Gail Cooper had clearly seen, full face, possibly more than once, the man she identified, Melissa Little was somehow able (after spending hours with both witnesses) to state “There are many similarities between Miss Tanner’s man and Gail’s”
Gerry McCann stated in his Powerpoint presentation to Leicestershire Police: “Miss Tanner spent a full day with Melissa Little, a qualified Police Sketch Artist since 1986, to compile this likeness of the suspect”
Miss [Jane] Tanner believes that there is an 80% likelihood that this is the same man she saw carrying away the child, believed to be Madeleine.
The News of the World developed this story still further. They wrote: “The sketch by qualified police artist Melissa Little bears an uncanny resemblance to an earlier picture, based on Miss Tanner's story”. Paulo Reis added this comment to his article: “This is unsurprising given both selections had - using considerable artistic licence - been made by the same artist, Melissa Little, and paid for by Mr Kennedy to assist the McCanns”.
Paulo Reis hinted strongly that Melissa Little may not have been independent, but in effect had colluded with Brian Kennedy and the McCann Team to suggest to the British public that the two images were of the same man. To achieve this, Melissa Little also sketched a drawing of how Monsterman might have looked carrying a child. As no-one had actually seen him doing so, this was most certainly the use of artistic licence, at best, and arguably dishonest.
Two footnotes need to be added.
First, the man identified as ‘Monsterman’ by Melissa Little’s sketch was soon identified by the Portuguese police and firmly ruled out of any connection to Madeleine’s disappearance.
Second, Jane Tanner had taken part in an identity parade on 13 May 2007, 10 days after Madeleine’s reported disappearance. One of those paraded before her, viewed from inside a police van with a two-way mirror, was Robert Murat.. Jane Tanner told the police that she was adamant that Robert Murat was the abductor she had seen just 10 days earlier. Murat was made a formal suspect two days later, partly on the strength of Tanner’s strong conviction that he was the man she had seen. However, Murat looked nothing like either the man she had described as having seen on 3 May, nor did he look anything like ‘Monsterman’. How was it possible for Jane Tanner, who had never seen the man’s face in the first place, to first of all say it was Robert Murat, and then to say it was ‘80% likely’ that he was Gail Cooper’s ‘Monsterman’?
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Response from the Home Office
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