Was this Madeleine?

Was this Madeleine? Revealed, the photo files Portuguese police kept secret... to the fury of the distraught McCanns

By Arthur Martin
Last updated at 10:44 PM on 02nd March 2010


Secret files released yesterday show that Portuguese police dismissed dozens of potential sightings of Madeleine McCann.
Leads from around the world - including CCTV footage from New Zealand of a child looking strikingly like the missing girl - were filed away under the heading 'not relevant'.
Information that police forces in the United States, Europe and North Africa considered important was also discarded.
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Lead: This CCTV image of a girl strongly resembling Madeleine in a supermarket in New Zealand was among the leads deemed 'not relevant' by Portugese police

None of the files was handed to private investigators working for Madeleine's parents, Gerry and Kate.
Mrs McCann, 41, last night said the disclosure of the secret files was heartbreaking and shocking.
Their existence came to light in a legal action brought by the McCanns against Goncalo Amaral, the disgraced detective who was in charge of the case.

Madeleine went missing from Praia da Luz in Portugal in May 2007

They had wanted to stop him airing the slur that they had been involved in their daughter's disappearance.
The leads were all received and archived after Algarve police closed the case in July 2008.

Madeleine was four when she vanished from the family's holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in May 2007. Her parents were at a restaurant 80 yards away.
They now have a copy of the 2,000-page dossier which was published yesterday on the order of a court in Portugal after an application by newspapers including the Daily Mail.
The McCanns are incensed that their private investigators were given no access to the sightings at the time.
Mrs McCann said: 'There are instances where information which we think is very credible and worthy of information has not been actioned.
'We're gutted, it's absolutely shocking and difficult. Some of the information handed in was very credible. It's heartbreaking to know that it seems to end there.'

Mr McCann, also 41, was particularly angered at Inspector Ricardo Paiva, who was responsible for collating any information about Madeleine after the formal investigation ended.
He said: 'Inspector Paiva believes Madeleine is dead. How can he investigate thoroughly if he believes that? We know now there is a lot of information just filed away - and that is not acceptable. Once the file has been closed, what has actually been done? Next to nothing.'
The file contains a series of sightings which the McCanns would have expected to be fully investigated.
The astonishing CCTV footage from New Zealand shows a girl very like Madeleine being led into a supermarket by a portly man in shorts - seven months after her disappearance.
The man's behaviour aroused the suspicions of a female security guard in the shop in Dunedin on the South Island and she approached the girl to establish she was British.


Kate and Gerry McCann said they were 'gutted' to discover that they weren't given access to secret files involving their daughter's disappearance

Although the girl said her name was 'Hailey', the security guard was convinced the girl was Madeleine and reported the incident to police.
Interpol in Wellington then sent the images to police in Portugal who promptly deemed it 'not relevant'.

Other discarded leads include:
• A British ex-pat saying he saw a girl being dragged along a road toward the airport on the night Madeleine disappeared. He had not approached the authorities earlier because he was wanted for fraud.
• A girl like Madeleine was seen with an unkempt Spanish-looking man in his 30s at a shop near Murcia. The woman witness followed the girl but the pair vanished. She failed to tell Spanish police until June 2008.
• Another lookalike wearing only a dirty yellow jumper was seen being held at gunpoint on a French motorway by a half-naked man in August 2008. French lorry driver Michel Guidard walked toward them only to be threatened with a gun.
• Photos from the internet uncovered by a female French detective were found to show images of sexual abuse which involved a girl resembling Madeleine.
• An account by a Scottish mother of two who saw a girl who looked like Madeleine with a group of gipsies in Albufeira, Portugal, in July 2008. A woman who was with the girl ran off down the hill with her when two police officers turned up.
• Details of a sighting of a girl on October 9, 2008, with a Portuguese man living in the U.S. He allegedly ran a child trafficking operation smuggling in children from his homeland, Mexico and Greece.
Clarence Mitchell, spokesman for the McCanns, said: 'They are incredibly frustrated that this was sitting there and being disregarded by the Portuguese police.
'They were shocked when they saw the scale of the information that had come in and the lack of action taken.
'There are potential leads in the file that are now being followed up by our investigators.
'It's more than a pity that the file has just sat there for so long and simply marked "not relevant" by the Portuguese.
'There are also images in the file that are strikingly similar to Madeleine and are being looked into.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1254997/Was-Maddie-McCann-Revealed-photo-files-Portuguese-police-kept-secret--fury-distraught-McCanns.html#ixzz0h41ofQ5e

OMG This is so shocking!! The world should know about the PJ incompetance. That child does look very much like Madeleine.

Let's hope one of those leads makes them find Madeleine.
fingers crossed.

And realistically, all of these sightings are of little girls, whether Madeleine or not. And clearly many are in danger, yet still nothign was done.



And even worse for the Portuguese one with the gypsy, because no other agency could investigate it at all.

I wonder why the NZ police didnt continue with the investigation, making it public to try to get someone to identify the person in the supermarket. TBH, my neice looks like Madeleine, same hair etc, but not as slim, and if you saw her face in a grainy picture you would think it was Madeleine. So IMO if it has been advertised, the NZ police may have been able to cross it off. Can they not investigate further without Portugues approval? I didnt think this was the case, because when the PI's were looking for the Australian woman, the AFP (Australian Federal Police) and the VIc police both invesigate to rule out sightings.

I am so upset, I am shocked, very upset and unbelievably angry, so angry I am shaking with rage. I cannot believe what i have just read, my heart goes out to that little mite and her parents and grandparents. If I was near Paiva now I think I would hit him, the b astard!

I HOPE YOU CAN SLEEP NIGHTS PAIVA!

I wonder if he is in this up to his neck with his mate Amaral?

I hope that person that done the recent interview with Amaral, Sousa I think his name is, well i hope he makes a big show of this and the Expresso, it is time that Amaral and his cronies were exposed.
Something MUST be done about them NOW!

I will again be contacting the British government and insisting they do something to help Madeleine and her parents.

RICARDO PAIVA MUST BE SACKED NOW!

Ah, I have no words. Really shocked and stunned. Crushed. How could you?

Evil, twisted bast*rds. Sacking them is not enough, not NEARLY enough.

I expect that New Zealand didn't investigate further because they believed that their information was taken seriously and investigated by The PJ. Who wouldn't think this?

Sabot wrote:I expect that New Zealand didn't investigate further because they believed that their information was taken seriously and investigated by The PJ. Who wouldn't think this?

This is what I believe too Sabot and as a result of the PJ's utter incompetence, blatant could not care less attitude, vital leads which may have helped detectives find Madeleine have been lost.

How contemptibly and callously cruel.

Now with these revelations and the tide already beginning to turn against Amaral in Portugal, I hope he and his friend Paiva are exposed for exactly what they are.

In that interview on Portuguese TV SIC the other night, the presenter asking the questions Miguel, asked Amaral why he decided to stay eating shrimps and drinking with his friends rather than attend the scene and take charge, thus preserving the crime scene. Amaral waffled about other coordinators not bothering to go to crime scenes either, yet are we all not led to believe that abductions are rare in Portugal? If they are so rare, then why didn't Goncalo Amaral, the coordinator of police in Portimao, the patch where little Madeleine had disappeared from, bother to turn up at the scene? Why did he prefer to stay scoffing shrimps and drinking with his pals rather than go to the scene of a deadly serious crime?

So Amaral's attitude towards Kate and Gerry is bad enough, a person in charge of the biggest criminal investigation into the disappearance of a child 1) Does not bother to turn up at the crime scene 2) has NEVER bothered to meet Kate and Gerry personally.

Then we have Ricardo Paiva, the officer put in as the McCanns liaison officer, he was meant to be helping Kate and Gerry and reporting things that they remembered about what had happened as well as helping them understand what is happening in the search and investigation etc, this is standard practice, but now we learn that along with his "friend" Goncalo Amaral, they suspected the parents immediately and did not bother to look for Madeleine. Paiva befriended the McCanns, told them he believed Madeleine was abducted, had them over to his home for dinner and for their twins to play with his own children, all the while he was doing this and pretending to be their friend, he was stabbing them in the back.

NO WONDER PAIVA COULD NOT LOOK KATE McCANN IN THE EYES, HE MUST HAVE BEEN THOROUGHLY ASHAMED OF HIMSELF!

Ricardo Paiva is the same man who later filed away over 2000 pages of information which may have proved absolutely vital to finding Madeleine, without even looking at them.

And people wonder why we have such a low opinion of the Portuguese police? If I were a good PJ detective, or a good member of the GNR or PSP, I would be absolutely thunderously livid with Goncalo Amaral and Ricardo Paiva and their other "selected" cronies, because of them a chance to solve this crime was lost and the good Portuguese police, along with everyone else today must be asking this same question, why? Why did Goncalo Amaral and Ricardo Paiva deliberately set out to railroad this investigation?

Rosie, I am over the moon about that interview with Amaral. Talvares is such a clever man, perfectly correct and totally on the ball. But then he is a lawyer. He has read The Book, and he has read The Files, and he totally decimated Amaral.

I did also so love the bit about Leonor Cipriano. She has not been abandoned.

Pedro my friend, You are a star, and you have lightened my day. So often I have nearly sunk into despair. I understood your translation perfectly. But I will read it again, if someone would tell me where it is.

Much love to you, Pedro. You are a brave man. xx

Sabot my friend, thank you for your kind words, but, we all are stars. To see the whole interview, please, go to the post: Request for Portuguese Posters, where you can read the whole interview.

Pedro Silva wrote:Sabot my friend, thank you for your kind words, but, we all are stars. To see the whole interview, please, go to the post: Request for Portuguese Posters, where you can read the whole interview.

Never underestimate your own worth, Pedro. It must have taken hours to translate that. And we have all been hogtied by our inability to speak or understand Portuguese.

I love your country and would live there if I could afford to buy a house. I have had some amazing holidays there, although I was never one for the high life. I love your markets, except that I did get a bit thrown by skinned horse's heads. And once, at the time of The Revolution, I drove down from Roscoff to The Algarve, And got jumped upon by very scary soldiers waving guns in the middle of the night. But my best memory is of the endless miles of perfect and very beautiful cobble stones.

I don't know how old you are so I could be talking before your time, but it worries me a little that Sousa Mendes who was the Portuguese Ambassador to Bordeaux during the war, and who saved so many jews, was so outrageously villified by Salazar. I do hope that some people remember how brave he was. He is a Righteous Gentile.

I feel sorry for the people of Portugal to have this inept shower in charge, they, and Madeleine, deserve better!

Don´t worry my friend Sabot, I don´t underestimate my own worth, about hours, yes, a lot of hours, but, I´ll glady do it. My time is much after Salazar.

On the NZ sighting.

I havent seen the NZ news, but I assume that this still photo is being shown (I havent seen our morning news this morning either, as my satellite was not operating properly). This would imply that if this little girl is not Madeleine, then the man with her, would know, surely he would recognise himself and the child (daughter??), and front up to a police station. I know that I would.

Also, relatives, friends etc, would have seen him and the child on the tv, and so may report him.

What I am saying is that I expect if this man is legit, that he will turn up soon. If he doesnt, then it should be investigated immediately, to try to ascertain who he is, and who the little girl is.

Very good point, Dianeh. Who is he? No innocent person should mind being involved. Someone will know who he is.