Portuguese police admit confusion in Maddie case
Tensions between local force and senior officers revealed as McCanns launch new £80,000 advertising campaign to find missing daughter
Portuguese police have admitted that confusion and disagreements in the early stages of the Madeleine McCann investigation meant that they could find it "very, very difficult" to prove their suspicion that her parents Kate and Gerry were somehow involved in the four-year-old girl's disappearance.
The startling admission, ahead of a crucial ruling this week by a Portuguese judge on how the case should proceed, came from sources close to the four-month investigation. The McCanns have strongly and repeatedly denied any involvement, yesterday launching a fresh advertising campaign aimed at finding their daughter.
The sources said that potentially crucial evidence about what happened to Madeleine on the night of May 3 had been lost by the time the first local police arrived, due to the presence of the McCanns, their friends and others in the holiday flat from which she disappeared.
In the days that followed, there was growing tension between the Algarve force which took the lead in the investigation and senior officers from Lisbon, who were particularly sceptical about the decision to focus suspicion on a local British resident, Robert Murat, nearly two weeks after Madeleine's disappearance following a tip-off from a British journalist.
"British police and crime experts also suggested that Murat fitted the profile to have been behind a kidnapping," a police source said. But the Lisbon investigators were, from the start, unsettled about the lack of any motive.
"Months later, there is nothing to suggest he was involved," said the source, adding that precious time and resources had been lost before DNA results prompted this month's sudden shift of focus on to the McCanns.
But the source -- in the most detailed explanation yet of the reasons behind the naming of the parents as 'arguido', or formal suspects -- also said that Portuguese investigators were now united in their conviction that the McCanns' accounts of what happened on May 3 "never rang true" and that "they could hold the key" to the case.
Revealing details of the investigation, which were passed in a 4,000-page file to the judge last week, the source singled out what he termed as contradictions in the "changing versions of events" offered by each parent and their friends in the days after Madeleine went missing.
Specifically, he said Gerry McCann initially told police that he entered the flat in the Algarve resort of Praia Da Luz from a "locked front door", but later said he had entered through the open back terrace facing the restaurant where the McCanns and their friends had been dining.
Kate McCann, he added, at first said the back window was open and the blind raised, while other witnesses disagreed.
He also described how a plastic barrier near their restaurant table would have "prevented any clear view of events inside the flat" and that contradictory accounts had raised doubts among the investigators about their claim to have checked on Madeleine and the McCanns' two-year-old twins during dinner.
Yet in an apparent acknowledgment that the police remain far from confident of being able to move on their suspicions concerning Madeleine's parents, the source also raised for the first time the possibility of prosecutors bringing lesser charges -- "notably, the abandonment or neglect of a child" -- against them.
The McCanns insist they checked on their daughter every 30 minutes during the evening of May 3. "It will be very, very difficult, until and unless a body is found -- and with DNA and other evidence so far inconclusive -- to bring a charge of homicide," the source said.
Madeleine's parents, however, insist their daughter is still alive, and an stg£80,000 advertising campaign to help find the four-year-old was announced yesterday. It has also emerged that the McCanns have appointed the former government media officer Clarence Mitchell to oversee the campaign after their spokesperson for the past two months, Justine McGuinness, stood down last night.
Mitchell was sent to Portugal by the Foreign Office as chief adviser to the McCanns shortly after Madeleine was reported missing. He is expected to resign from his post as director of the Media Monitoring Unit in the Cabinet Office, London, this week.
Part of his new brief will be studying the Portuguese press amid concern that a recent spate of negative newspaper reports has led the McCanns to believe there has been an orchestrated campaign of leaks to undermine them.
To counter perceptions of an anti-McCann campaign within elements of the Portuguese media, Olegario Sousa, the official police spokesman since the start of the investigation, was moved from the role last Friday.
Inquiries are now being fielded by a pair of press officers at police headquarters in Lisbon whose brief is to issue only officially sanctioned announcements.
One police source yesterday referred to "pure speculation in the Portuguese media" ahead of the judge's ruling. He dismissed a local newspaper report, which was picked up worldwide, that police were now increasingly convinced that Madeleine's body had been dumped into the sea.
"We checked local boats, and marinas up and down the coast, very early on, and there was no evidence of that," a police source said.
Particularly upsetting for the family were reports alleging that extracts from Kate McCann's diary suggested she was sometimes impatient with her "hyperactive" children and felt insufficiently supported by her husband.
Last night, two of Kate McCann's closest friends came forward to defend her, insisting she could not have had anything to do with the disappearance. Linda McQueen, 45, and Nicky Gill, 39, who have been known Kate since she was a child, described her as a devoted mother.
"To have these words said about her is just so unfair and hurtful," said Gill. Asked if she had ever doubted Kate's innocence, McQueen added: "Not at all, not a shadow of a doubt. They are the most loving, caring, family-oriented couple that you could ever meet. They are absolutely fabulous. Those three children are the world to them, as our children are to them as well," she added.
Among the issues the judge will decide upon this week are whether the McCann parents should remain as arguidos; what further interrogations, searches or seizure of potential evidence will be authorised; and what charges, if any, should be brought. The McCanns' Portuguese lawyer, Carlos Pinto de Abreu, said yesterday he expected the parents to remain suspects, but declined to speculate on any possible charges.
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