I invite you to review this article after actually READING "
The Truth of the Lie" and the
PJ files. I would suggest that it is NOT Goncalo Amaral who should be feeling any sense of shame in regard to the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Others (including this reporter)
should, Gonçalo Amaral should not.
As the McCanns are cleared, The detective sacked from the Maddie hunt launches his book.
For the failure to solve the case, he blames her parents, MI5, the British police, the NHS and even Gordon Brown.
In short, everyone but himself
26 July 2008
Daily Mail
Richard Pendlebury
EL CORTE INGLES is Lisbon's grandest department store. The name loosely translates as 'The English Style', though 'corte' can also mean a cut, as from a knife. Perhaps the ambiguity amused super sleuth Goncalo Amaral, for this was the location he chose on Thursday evening to launch the 'confidencial' inside story of his most sensational case: the mystery of Madeleine McCann.
The
portly detective sat before a table piled high with his newly published paperback memoir of the investigation, ready to be signed and sold at £10 apiece. Hundreds of local people had queued to see him.
As the officer in charge of the hunt for Madeleine from the night she vanished until he was
fired from the case last October, Amaral, 48,
presided over the shredding of the reputation of the Portuguese CID.
With a
perjury charge still hanging over him, connected to an alleged assault in a separate missing-child case, he has just taken early retirement to publish his book.
'I want to clear my name,' he says in the blurb. To this end, 40,000 copies of
Maddie: A Verdade Da Mentira (The Truth Of The Lie) are to be printed in Portuguese alone. An English translation is being arranged, and lucrative international rights are being neglotiated (SIC).
This week the unsolved case was finally
shelved, and Kate and Gerry McCann were cleared of their arguido -- official suspect -- status.
Yet in Amaral's book, the couple face a fresh attack from the former police chief who long ago decided their guilt.
(Blogger note: See wikileaks cables re: British police / McCanns)
The couple's lawyers are on a war footing and they intend to sue. Having read the book with the help of a translator, it is not hard to see why.
It takes character to admit gross failure. Amaral has not done this in print. Instead, he
petulantly dresses it up as a conspiracy against him while, without any hard evidence,
(Blogger note: See video / British cadaver dogs) placing blame on those who were hurt most.
We cannot go into the allegations he makes against the McCanns, as they have indicated they will take legal action if the charges are repeated. In any case, most of them are already known.
But what can be examined in detail is the long list of institutions which the
embittered former head of the Portimao CID blames for his
inability to crack the case.
Most of these are British. He says he was a victim of international politics. He claims the British media sided against him, and that their portrayal of Portugal as a 'Third World country' hampered the investigation.
He says the British police, the Diplomatic Service, the MI5 and even the NHS were blocking his path to the 'material truth'.
He even hints that Prime Minister Gordon Brown delayed signing last year's Lisbon Treaty until it was confirmed that 'this humble Portuguese employee' was removed from the McCann investigation.
But it is not just Britain he blames. The Portuguese government and even the Policia Judiciria, to which he had belonged for 26 years, 'betrayed' him.
During the investigation, his beloved wife left him. His dog was killed under suspicious circumstances, perhaps because of the case.
His martyrdom was 'unique', he writes. This was crushing to 'minha dignidade' -- my dignity.
SOME of the blame Amaral heaps on his junior colleagues is almost certainly justified.
On the night of May 3, 2007, Amaral -- who had been brought up in Lisbon -- was the head of the CID in the Algarve town of Portimao, a few minutes down the coastal highway from the resort village of Luz.
He says he was informed by phone of Madeleine's disappearance that evening, at midnight. The National Guard -- a junior branch of the police services -- had been on the scene.
But before specialised detectives arrived, he says, Apartment 5A of the Ocean Club complex had become the scene of a virtual 'arrial' -- a party.
A host of National Guard personnel, dogs, resort staff, members of the McCann family and friends and other people had trampled through it, damaging potential evidence.
Even at this early stage, he began to see
conspiracy theories: 'We had to wonder if that kind of contamination was unconscious or intentional.'
The next day Amaral seemed appalled that the police were visited first by the British Consul in Portimao and then no less a person than the British ambassador.
'It was not normal,' he exclaims. 'Who was this couple? Who were their friends? We did not need diplomats. We needed quick answers to the questions' -- particularly from the English police whose tardiness he was already critcising.
He complained that, from the start, ' politics and diplomacy seemed to be shaping the initiative'.
In particular, he felt he was not being helped as much as he could by the British authorities.
He says he was told that British security services had bugged the McCanns and their friends. 'If that was the case, information [from the bugging] was never given to us.'
Amaral was suspicious of the motives of the British police officers who arrived in Luz on May 7. He ordered a 'shadow' on the senior British officer in Luz.
'I want to know what they are doing,' he told his subordinate. 'You will escort them day and night.'
Amaral writes how he had wanted Madeleine's UK medical records, but they 'were not given to us because of huge difficulties raised in England.
'They certainly would have been very important. Why were they not given to us? The British judicial system was not very co-operative in these matters, which was regrettable.'
More
conspiracies and
paranoia.
(Blogger note: See wikileaks cables re: British police / McCanns) Early on, Amaral fixed on alleged inconsistencies in the testimonies of the main individuals in the case and their 'bizarre' behaviour. Anything else was a distraction.
Amaral was clearly uncomfortable about the investigation's international profile, and perturbed that senior British politicians, such as Gordon Brown, had shown interest.
This is understandable, for he was a
provincial policeman. Yet in his book, he interprets such political involvement as a sign of forces at work beyond his control.
But wasn't this simply the case of a man
out of his depth and
looking for excuses?
It seems extraordinary, for example, that it was not until July that specialist forensic sniffer dogs were brought in, and from the UK. By that stage, Amaral admits in his book, the case had reached a 'dead end'.
But while the dogs' findings -- they are said to have detected spots of blood in the apartment from which Madeleine had disappeared and other matter in the boot of the McCanns' hire car --
appeared to confirm his own well-advanced theories, the development also led to the final, fatal split with his British colleagues.
(Blogger note: Another video of the British sniffer dogs at work in the McCann case)
When a British police superintendent arrived and declared himself 'disappointed' at the inconclusive nature of results from the UK Forensic Science Service, Amaral could see only two possibilities.
One, that the British technician responsible was incompetent. The other that there was deliberate obfuscation.
He writes
conspiratorially of the subsequent 'nervousness of British police . . . who wanted to know everything that was going on'.
As the British police urged caution, Amaral became ever more convinced of his theories. He rationalised that the UK police were reluctant to get drawn into a prosecution on foreign soil.
On September 7 last year, the McCanns were made official suspects. Soon afterwards, they left for the UK. Amaral was astounded by the alleged reaction of the British police who maintained their links with the couple.
He argues that after Kate and Gerry were made suspects, the British police should have severed their links with the couple.
'It happened with the Portuguese police. But this rupture did not occur between the couple and the British police.'
The point is that the British force was still pursuing the possibility of a kidnap.
Tension between the two police forces had been growing for some time and in that month when the McCanns were declared suspects, it erupted.
When a tourist picture taken of a woman in Morocco with a blonde child on her back appeared in the UK Press, Amaral was furious.
'I asked a colleague to contact the English police to ask what was happening,' he writes. 'The answer could not have been more unreal and absurd . . . They had received the photo and showed it immediately [to the McCanns and the media] without consulting us, who were in charge of the criminal investigation.'
His frustration was perhaps understandable. The child was almost immediately shown not to be Madeleine. And Amaral's team was being overwhelmed by both well-meaning and malicious reports of sightings from all over the world.
In the following month, October, Amaral was removed as co-ordinator of the investigation. He claims it was not because of 'incompetence, but because of an inconvenient outburst'. In a terse exchange, he had accused British detectives of chasing leads only that Gerry and Kate McCann wanted following up.
A journalist had phoned him to ask about an alleged sighting of Madeleine in Lisbon, information that had been e-mailed to British police.
Amaral -- who had long since given up on the theory that the little girl had been kidnapped -- writes that he gave an 'irrational answer' demanding that the British police should fall in line with the Portuguese.
He was sacked by fax and recalled to regional headquarters in Faro.
He says his dismissal was 'orchestrated by the British media'. The strategy was simple: 'Attack the investigation and portray Portugal as a Third World country with a judicial system that is completely obsolete.'
But he also writes,
astonishingly, that higher powers were at work.
'The British Prime Minister had spoken to (the UK police) asking to confirm my resignation.
'We didn't know the reason for such an interest in such a humble Portuguese public employee.
'We didn't know what happened backstage of the Lisbon Treaty negotiations, before the signing of the Treaty.'
But he adds,
darkly:
'For first time in Policia Judiciria history, an employee lost his job due to external influences.'
Reflecting on his dismissal, he lambasts the British police, who had failed to deliver background reports on the McCanns and their friends 'though we knew they had them'.
(Blogger note: See the Gaspar's statement re: David Payne - withheld by the British police.)
'They came to Portugal not as an act against our sovereignty, but in a display of international police co-operation.'
Yet such co-operation, he argues, requires a high degree of mutual trust. 'Soon we realised it would not be like that,' he writes, pointing out that when the McCanns finally returned home to Britain, so did the British police.
'We felt they were ordered to stay in Portugal only for the McCann couple rather than Madeleine. She vanished here. So what is the reason for the UK police to leave? It is a question no one can answer.'
But as far as Amaral was concerned, the answer was clear, apparently. It was a conspiracy against his investigation.
In his book, he writes that he believes Madeleine died in Apartment 5A on the night of May 3 last year. That is all we can report here of his beliefs.
His account begins with a reminder that Britain and Portugal enjoyed a centuries-old political alliance.
It ends with repeated and rather
ludicrious allusions to a historic Portuguese notable who had defied the demands of an overweening British ally.
A local crime reporter, who knows the Portuguese police intimately, said that Amaral remains very well-respected among his former brethren, several of whom appeared in Lisbon to support him.
'He was a copper's copper. The only criticism or doubt I have heard about him is that he may not be an open-minded policeman.
'One policeman told me that when he thinks something has happened, he excludes all other lines of inquiry.
'And that can sometimes be a dangerous trait.'
Indeed. The McCann case was the most high profile of Amaral's career -- the pressures were enormous -- and the only one, it is said by supporters, that he failed to crack.
That hurt him deeply. But his hurt was nothing near that of the McCanns, who lost their child and have now, once again, been maligned in his book.
Labels:
Al Hoffman,
Alexander Ellis,
Forensic Science Services,
Gaspar statement,
Goncalo Amaral,
Gonçalo Amaral,
Leicestershire Police,
Policia Judiciaria,
WikiLeaks
