The interim report of Tavares de Almeida of the Portuguese Police, 10 September 2007 This is the report which explains why the McCanns were made ‘arguidos’ (suspects). Interim report for the attention of the Criminal Investigation Coordinator Madeleine Beth McCann was born on 12 May 2003. She has been missing since the 3 May 2007, an event that took place in Praia da Luz, near Lagos. She is the daughter of Dr Gerald and Dr Kate McCann. Her birth was desired and planned. The mother’s difficulty in becoming pregnant should nevertheless be mentioned, as well as the resulting necessary treatment and its cost. She was born from ‘in vitro’ insemination, but the tracing of the child’s DNA shows that she is in fact the McCann couple’s daughter. It is a scientific fact that the medical treatments to overcome some of the causes for the lack of pregnancy increase the likelihood of twins being born from a so-called normal pregnancy. In this case, we can see that a pregnancy, although desired and planned, turned a family of three into a family of five. Moreover, caring for one child is not the same as caring for three, all of tender age. We began with an abduction scenario: At around midnight on the 3 May 2007, following a telephone call between the GNR [local police force] in Lagos and this police station, we were informed of the disappearance of a child, an English citizen. We went there to carry out the necessary judicial investigation. Faced with the fact of the disappearance of a child, the investigation sketched out several possible scenarios. The child’s parents immediately attributed her disappearance to the action of a third party, promoting the scenario that she had been abducted. Abduction was only one of a number of possible scenarios, but the family publicised their claim that Madeleine had been abducted in a manner that had never been seen before. On the very next day, English television stations led their broadcasts with the news of Madeleine’s disappearance. The media presented the abduction as the truth, although we were looking at other scenarios. As time went by, the abduction scenario was not confirmed. The abduction hypothesis did not stand up. For instance, no ransom was ever demanded in exchange for information by the alleged kidnappers or for the child herself. Nevertheless, and considering the evidence of one of the McCanns’ friends, Jane Tanner, we continued examining the possibility that Madeleine had been abducted. This went alongside the gathering of all kinds of information, working on a number of other possible scenarios. The McCanns worked on their account 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. According to their story, they all went out to dine each evening and all left their children asleep in their apartments whilst they were dining. The group told us that they held a meeting during which they agreed certain procedures for continuous checking of the children while they dined. Our files include a manuscript by one of the group’s members that backs this claim. The group’s programme for checking the children: This claim, that the group had a shared programme for regularly checking their children, had the effect on English public opinion that the whole group was exonerated from any blame. Their claim meant that any abnormal event that might last longer than 30 minutes was impossible, as they all agreed that that was the interval between the checks. The group could not sustain the claim that there was checking ‘every 15 to 30 minutes’. In fact the contradictions between their statements made it easy to see that they were all lying. One individual in the group, wanting to make the group’s version about the checking more consistent, gave it a personal touch, stating that the checks on the children were carried out in two ways: the first method being just to listen to see if anyone was crying, in which case silence meant that all was well, and the second method by actually entering the apartment to check. For example, one of the group, Dr Matthew Oldfield, did just that - listen to see if all was well - apparently telling Dr Kate McCann that all was well, with no further explanation. This is what Dr Kate McCann herself recalls. The abduction claim was strongly maintained:
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 10:34:19 +0000
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