10th anniversary interviews with Goncalo Amaral

Madeleine milestone: Amaral agrees “some things we did weren’t right”











As mainstream media in the UK continues to churn out thinly-disguised ‘rehash stories’ on the world’s most famous missing person, here in Portugal the media circus has been much more demure as we approach the date on which exactly 10 years ago three-year-old Madeleine McCann simply vanished.

No wild exclusives pointing to new “prime suspects” or landmark television events, rather a backward view at a case that may have been set up from the very beginning to remain an eternal mystery.

Keeping an incredibly low profile since his double victory at the Supreme Court in the tortuous legal battle with Kate and Gerry McCann, former PJ coordinator Gonçalo Amaral has finally given interviews to journalists working for the Cofina group, which publishes Sábado weekly magazine, and ‘people’s daily’ Correio da Manha.

And, for reasons that have nothing to do with the insults regularly thrown at him by British tabloids, the quiet-spoken, reserved 57-year-old agrees there were some things that from the outset Portuguese police did not do right.

“I should not have allowed us to be put under pressure”, he told CM’s Sunday Magazine, adding that when the McCann family finally left Praia da Luz in September 2007, the British police that had come over to assist the Portuguese investigation also left - leaving the “sensation that they were only here to protect the couple”.

Amaral said that another mistake came in the way “the group of Brits” now known as the Tapas 7 was included in on meetings with the PJ, “to know what was going on”.

“I went to one of the first meetings and decided that I would never do that again”, he explained. “In normal conditions, in an investigation like this one, they would have been straight away considered suspects”. Instead, the way the group was brought into developments “prejudiced the investigation”, he said.

“There is an issue that the Portuguese police have to start adopting in these (kind of) cases”, Amaral added.

“Instead of leading a question and answer interrogation in which the person (being questioned) is relaxed, waiting for the question to answer, it would be better if they adopted the way of the FBI: “Here is a pen and paper, and you are going to write down, in your own time and words, everything that you did, where you went, who you were with, etc., from the moment you got up to the moment the day ended”.

The current form of interrogation used by Portuguese police “could lead people, and indicate where we (the police) want to go”, he explained.

Over various pages in both Sábado and CM, Amaral was given time to revisit his ‘politically incorrect’ theories, reasons for coming to them and suggest other lesser known ‘mistakes’ - like the failure to check CCTV cameras on the road in which an Irish family said they saw a man carrying a child in pyjamas down towards the sea.

By the time investigators realised the sighting might be crucial, the CCTV images had been recorded over.

The “Smith sighting” as it has become known could be one of the most crucial moments in the evening of May 3 before Madeleine was reported missing - yet the family never returned to Portugal to make formal statements because, in October 2007 “Amaral was removed from the case after talking to Diário de Notícias”, explains Sábado.

And here, Amaral says came another major mistake.

“I should never have retired from the PJ”, he told interviewers, stressing that instead he should have “written and published the book” (Maddie: The Truth of the Lie, which led to years of “brutal” litigation with Madeleine’s parents) as a member of the PJ Judicial Police.

“We were just too honest”, Amaral concluded. “And we paid for it as a result.

“For example, we sent forensic material to a British laboratory, when the testing could have been done at a Portuguese laboratory, so that we would not be accused of manipulation in the final result.

“We were naive and too diplomatic”, he said - adding that in his opinion, the ‘abduction theory’ adopted within days of Madeleine’s disappearance is a “lack of respect” to what should have been an “objective investigation”.

“If the investigation ever reaches its end and if it can be proved that the parents had nothing to do with it, then fine”, Amaral stressed - much as he has always maintained. It is simply the fact that no other hypothesis other than abduction has appeared to be allowed consideration (click here).

But while Amaral ‘returned to Praia da Luz’ to give his view of the 10 long years since Madeleine vanished, the missing girl’s parents gave an interview to the BBC in which they insisted they will be appealing the Supreme Court decision that should have handed the former police investigator back his assets, after eight years in which they were ‘frozen’.

Gerry McCann explained that what he called “the last judgement” - the ruling that upheld Amaral’s right to freedom of expression, and refused to accept the McCann’s insistence that they had been considered innocent in their daughter’s disappearance - is, in his opinion, “terrible”.

“We will be appealing”, he told the national news service.

The Daily Express suggests the couple plan to appeal “all the way to the European Court of Human Rights”, though there is still no certainty that this can be done - particularly as Supreme Court judges Roque Nogueira, Alexandre Reis and Pedro Lima Gonçalves released their 75-page ruling making references to tenets set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

In other words, Amaral’s ‘win’ relied heavily on three judges’ interpretation of laws that the ECHR has been set up to protect.

natasha.donn@algarveresident.com

Photo by Bruno Colaço for Sábado which carried a six-page spread on "The Inpsector's return to the scene of the crime", while CM's title for the anniversary edition was "The dead end where Maddie McCann is hidden"

http://portugalresident.com/madeleine-milestone-amaral-agrees-%E2%80%9Csome-things-we-did-weren%E2%80%99t-right%E2%80%9D

What does he mean by this?


“If the investigation ever reaches its end and if it can be proved that the parents had nothing to do with it, then fine”, Amaral stressed

Not sure if this is the correct thread,please remove if not.

Posted by PORTUGALPRESS on May 03, 2017
Amaral breaks his silence

Quiet since the country’s highest court absolved him - for the second time in eight years - of having to pay huge sums in damages to the parents of Madeleine McCann, Gonçalo Amaral, author of the book “Maddie: the Truth of the Lie” spectacularly broke his silence this week to journalists of the Cofina group.

In perfect synchronicity first Sábado weekly magazine set the scene with “The Return of the Inspector to the Scene of the Crime”. Then daily paper Correio da Manhã ran a Sunday special on “The dead end hiding Maddie McCann”, and finally daily news channel CMTV ran “Maddie the Enigma” - a bombshell by any other name, going on air at midnight on May 1, and ending with merciless analysis an hour later on May 2.

Merciless, that is for the ‘politically correct’ British version of how a three year old girl became the world’s most famous missing person on the night of May 3, 2007.

If anyone thought former PJ coordinator Gonçalo Amaral would be measuring his words after an eight year legal fight with Kate and Gerry McCann that saw him “financially asphyxiated” as the couple attempted to sue him for €1.2 million, they will be now be thinking again.

The 57-year-old is every bit as convinced of his thesis - that Madeleine died in a tragic accident in apartment 5a of Luz Ocean Club in Praia da Luz - as he ever was.

Admitting nonetheless that the Portuguese police made some key mistakes at the outset, Amaral took Cofina group journalists round the former Ocean Club complex, explaining minutely why statements and accounts given by “the British group” of friends accompanying the McCanns did not, in his opinion, stack up.

It was an hour of ‘no mercy’. No inconvenient detail excluded. The “servility to the British” and to “political pressures”, the almost instant arrival on the scene of the British ambassador and press hordes, the allusion to children sedated by Calpol, the presence of “the investigation’s most enigmatic figure”, McCann friend and fellow doctor David Payne - whose “fetish”, said Amaral, was to bathe the children of other friends - and the spine-chilling reactions of blood and cadaver dogs Eddie and Keela.

CMTV returned time and again to footage of Eddie howling the presence of cadaver odour in the McCann apartment and car - and even featured a clip of him honing in on clothes laid out in unassociated surroundings.

Amaral talked of the possibility of Madeleine’s body having been kept in the freezer of an apartment, and then transferred to the boot of the McCann’s hire car months later.

“We had information that they (the McCanns) went to an apartment near the cemetery on many nights,” he told his interviewers. “We tried to find out which apartment it was”, but by this time - almost six months into the investigation - PJ superiors were getting ready to remove Amaral from the case, to concentrate instead on the abduction theory. This rapidly led to the case being archived, due to the complete absence of any conclusive evidence.

Since then, criminal analysts Moita Flores and Carlos Anjos accept “millions have been spent perpetuating a lie”.

“From the very outset, the investigation was politically conditioned”, former PJ inspector Moita Flores told CMTV’s late-night crime analysis Rua Segura (Safe Street).

If any Britons were watching, this was the moment where the differences in opinion between England and Portugal hit home.

This is not simply the story of one former PJ inspector’s theory versus the protestations of two parents, backed by the might of the Met. This is the story of a nation that does not accept that children are plucked from their tourist beds in the middle of the night by child traffickers, pedophiles, or even ‘bungling burglars’.

As PJ deputy head Pedro do Carmo told the BBC this week: “We have never had any case like this, either before or since”.

His response to the question, “do you think in your heart it will ever be solved” was telling nonetheless. He said: “If it depended on my heart, the case would already be solved. But it doesn’t depend on my heart. It depends, very much, on our minds”.

Moita Flores and Carlos Anjos were adamant that Scotland Yard is “protecting criminals”, while Amaral simply returned to his mantra for resolution: a proper investigation, that follows all lines until they are exhausted - not one that allows only one way forwards at the expense of everything else.

Mistakes? They may not be the sort people were expecting.

“I should not have allowed us to be put under so much pressure”, Amaral told Correio da Manhã’s Sunday magazine, explaining that when the McCann family finally left Praia da Luz in September 2007, the British police who had come over to assist the Portuguese investigation also left - leaving the “sensation that they were only here to protect the couple”.

“We were naive and too diplomatic”, he added. The desire to please the British led investigators to send trace evidence for testing to a UK-based laboratory “so that we would not be accused of manipulation in the final result”.

But while Amaral ‘returned to Praia da Luz’ to give his view of the 10 year old mystery, the missing girl’s parents gave an interview to the BBC in which they insisted they will be appealing the Supreme Court decision that should have handed back the former police coordinator his assets and police pension after eight years in which he struggled to survive.

Gerry McCann explained that what he called “the last judgement” - the ruling that upheld Amaral’s right to freedom of expression, and refused to accept the McCann’s insistence that they had been proved innocent in their daughter’s disappearance - is, in his opinion, “terrible”.

“We will be appealing”, he told the national news service.

The Daily Express suggests the couple plan to appeal “all the way to the European Court of Human Rights”, though there is still no certainty that this can be done - particularly as Supreme Court judges Roque Nogueira, Alexandre Reis and Pedro Lima Gonçalves released their 75-page ruling making references to tenets set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

In other words, Amaral’s ‘win’ relied heavily on three judges’ interpretation of laws that the ECHR was set up to protect.

As for the former PJ coordinator, he sees the Supreme court decision as redemption: the sign that his thesis is a “credible lead”, and that the police force he once served will finally take it as the incentive to “once and for all start investigating”.

By coincidence, as we wrote this article, the Daily Mail released an account quoting detective Colin Sutton, once tipped to “head up the Madeleine McCann probe” initiated by the Met in 2011, and which has reportedly so far cost in excess of €14 million.

Sutton told Martin Brunt of Sky News that he was “warned” by a high ranking source not to take the job as he would be “tasked” with proving Kate and Gerry McCann “were innocent, and (into) ignoring any alternatives to the abduction theory”.

natasha.donn@algarveresident.com

The link for Costello's post:

http://portugalresident.com/amaral-breaks-his-silence

Wow some things I had not heard before, but firstly it is noticeable that he still sticks to his original theory,




The 57-year-old is every bit as convinced of his thesis - that Madeleine died in a tragic accident in apartment 5a of Luz Ocean Club in Praia da Luz - as he ever was.




This bit I cannot remember ever reading....



“We had information that they (the McCanns) went to an apartment near the cemetery on many nights,” he told his interviewers. “We tried to find out which apartment it was”




What apartment near the cemetery... many nights??  Interesting is this in the files?


Thanks for posting Costello.

Again thanks to Joana.


The Crime of the Century
by Joana Morais 10 hrs ago






by André Ventura, University Professor

I will start with the conclusion: I think this was probably crime of the Century in Portugal. On May 3, 2007, in Praia da Luz, Madeleine disappeared to never be seen again. The case shocked the Country and the World, giving the motto for an unyielding conflict between the Portuguese and the English police authorities ...which still remains today!

We all still have these images in our heads: the despair of the family and friends, the odd and imperceptible expression of the mother, Kate McCann, asking for the return of her daughter, the solidarity of the people, the massive police presence. A whole country startled by the sad fate of a girl who could be the daughter of any of us. After ten years of a mystery that has never been solved, there are more doubts than certainties. But the hypothesis that the parents themselves, or one of the friends of the inner circle, are involved in the event, whether in an intentional or negligent way, is increasingly consistent. The investigation’s data, in my opinion, points this way.

Why was it that Kate - and no one suffers as much with the disappearance of a daughter as her own mother - gave evasive answers to the police, sometimes even reacting with contempt for the police's work? Why are the contradictions evident in Kate and Gerry's statements regarding simple facts, if whether they had or not argued the night before or if any of them had slept in the bedroom with the children? Why did the dogs alert to cadaver scent in the car used by the McCanns?

It is possible that we are before the crime of the century, where the disappearance or death of a girl ends without the guilty being known, in a plot where everyone insists on casting aspersions about hidden powers or incompetent police forces.

I'll leave this question: if the much acclaimed effort of the English police to find Maddie fails to produce results, despite the massive amount already invested, wouldn’t it be wise to reopen the investigation in Portugal, placing the homicide hypothesis again on the table?

in Correio da Manhã, May 1, 2017



https://joana-morais.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/the-crime-of-century.html

candyfloss wrote:Wow some things I had not heard before, but firstly it is noticeable that he still sticks to his original theory,




The 57-year-old is every bit as convinced of his thesis - that Madeleine died in a tragic accident in apartment 5a of Luz Ocean Club in Praia da Luz - as he ever was.




This bit I cannot remember ever reading....



“We had information that they (the McCanns) went to an apartment near the cemetery on many nights,” he told his interviewers. “We tried to find out which apartment it was”




What apartment near the cemetery... many nights??  Interesting is this in the files?


Thanks for posting Costello.

Sorry for requoting but anyone any links for this info about McCanns going to an apartment near the cemetery on many nights??  Anyone?

I can't remember off the top of my head. And not got the time just now to check.

But wasn't it the one with the the Tanner/Murat alleged DNA thing. On a sofa or something.

Good to see that GA stands by his original thesis.

Tony Bennett and Jill will have to try a little bit harder that he got it all wrong.

Not that anyone takes any notice of them.

candyfloss wrote:

candyfloss wrote:Wow some things I had not heard before, but firstly it is noticeable that he still sticks to his original theory,




The 57-year-old is every bit as convinced of his thesis - that Madeleine died in a tragic accident in apartment 5a of Luz Ocean Club in Praia da Luz - as he ever was.




This bit I cannot remember ever reading....



“We had information that they (the McCanns) went to an apartment near the cemetery on many nights,” he told his interviewers. “We tried to find out which apartment it was”




What apartment near the cemetery... many nights??  Interesting is this in the files?


Thanks for posting Costello.

Sorry for requoting but anyone any links for this info about McCanns going to an apartment near the cemetery on many nights??  Anyone?

I don't remember anything specific about being near to the cemetery or it being many nights but do remember the latter quote "We tried to find out which apartment it was". Just can't remember where I read/heard it....May have been one of the interviews/docs GA did in Portugal?

TheTruthWillOut wrote:

candyfloss wrote:

candyfloss wrote:Wow some things I had not heard before, but firstly it is noticeable that he still sticks to his original theory,




The 57-year-old is every bit as convinced of his thesis - that Madeleine died in a tragic accident in apartment 5a of Luz Ocean Club in Praia da Luz - as he ever was.




This bit I cannot remember ever reading....



“We had information that they (the McCanns) went to an apartment near the cemetery on many nights,” he told his interviewers. “We tried to find out which apartment it was”




What apartment near the cemetery... many nights??  Interesting is this in the files?


Thanks for posting Costello.

Sorry for requoting but anyone any links for this info about McCanns going to an apartment near the cemetery on many nights??  Anyone?

I don't remember anything specific about being near to the cemetery or it being many nights but do remember the latter quote "We tried to find out which apartment it was". Just can't remember where I read/heard it....May have been one of the interviews/docs GA did in Portugal?

Well he says they had information, so someone has given a statement - it just makes you wonder how much information is or has been kept back.

From what I can recall, didn't the Mcc's supposedly come across a drunken man in the middle of the road on their journey home from somewhere (can't remember where) and take him back to his flat? I think they had been leaflet dropping or something like that.

Daily Mail U.K.‏Verified account @DailyMailUK · 16m16 minutes ago
 


Kate and Gerry McCann join prayers for their daughter Madeleine on 10th anniversary of her disappearance

Mo wrote:From what I can recall, didn't the Mcc's supposedly come across a drunken man in the middle of the road on their journey home from somewhere (can't remember where) and take him back to his flat? I think they had been leaflet dropping or something like that.

Yes I recall that one Mo, but this says they went to this apartment on many nights?

(the McCanns) went to an apartment near the cemetery on many nights,”

Was looking for something else and came across this. Can't remember reading it before so will stick it up:

https://joana-morais.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/interview-with-gonalo-amaral-cadaver.html?m=1

Heads up for those that didn't watch last night or don't have SKY1 - it is on SKY News channel tonight at 8pm


Sky News‏Verified account @SkyNews · 36m36 minutes ago



A secret government report lays bare the failures in the #McCann investigation -
@skymartinbrunt reveals details at 8pm on Sky News

I remember a little bit of this apartment thing, but I thought it was nearer to the beach front, did he describe it at one point?

candyfloss wrote:

Kate and Gerry McCann join prayers for their daughter Madeleine on 10th anniversary of her disappearance

Rosa is going to have a field day with this.

Good to see that Gerry dressed up for the occasion.

Knowing the world's press will be watching, wearing jeans and a jumper to visit church to pray for your missing daughter shows a real lack of care and respect.

Has the latest interview with Goncalo been translated yet does anybody know...?

This came out on the 1st of May, If anyone can find a translated/voice-over/subtitle version then can you post it up....

Isn't that the one posted here that Joana was translating, perhaps she has done it now?

I looked on her blog and couldn't see anything. The video is nearly an hour long. Normally in the past somebody within a week or so has added the English subtitles or something at the bottom of it. It appears nobody has done as yet. Unless I just can't find it.

It would be great to hear what GA says and also what everyone else is saying on the programme.

Excellent. Give me a couple of hours and I'll have it all translated.

Has nobody invented some sort of App/website as yet where you upload a video and it automatically translates it to the chosen language?

Or something similar?