WALTER OPPENHEIMER|MIGUEL MORA
Lisbon / London 13 SEP 2007
The Madeleine case is breaking a gap between two historical allies: the United Kingdom and Portugal. Where some see police clumsiness, the others see unbearable media pressures and an unclear role of the British Government.
Although London has made clear that it has no intention of interfering in the police investigation, Portuguese public opinion believes that the unbeatable team formed by the Government of His Majesty and the British media intervened from the first minute. One of the triggers of this suspicion is the role of an official named Clarence Mitchell, highlighted by the Foreign Office in late May in Praia da Luz to advise the McCanns.
Clarence Mitchell is director of the Media Monitoring Unit, a little-known department that does work of extraordinary value to the British Government: it tracks the world's media to collect all the information that may be of interest to the Government. It is even considering tracking the most popular blogs , to detect new trends.
When Mitchell arrived in the Algarve at the end of May, the Madeleine case had already become a fair. The show fed by the parents to facilitate the search of the little Maddie began to forge in half planet. With it, the Catholic tone of the mission (Fatima, Vatican) rose even more and the banner of the press, propaganda and solidarity campaign reached global levels. The couple toured Europe, jumped to Morocco, flew to Madrid to seek help from Interior Minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba. Gerry met with US Attorney General Gonzalez, who has already resigned. Loading photos, plushies and clothes of the girl, the couple was blessed by Pope Benedict XVI. Celebrities like JK Rowling, José Mourinho and David Beckham made appeals and donations that helped the family raise 1,
Many Portuguese now believe, in the light of the suspicions gathered by the police against the McCanns, that this was nothing more than a gigantic smokescreen sponsored by the parents, two physicians with contacts and credibility, respected and with a good social situation, Which was aggravated by the voracity of the media and by the influence of the British Government to a point of no return.
The impression in Portugal is that the global climate of opinion generated by this political-media campaign prevented the police to investigate with calm and neutrality. First, because the wave of affection unleashed by the disappearance of Madeleine made the McCanns an irreproachable symbol of suffering and anguish. Second, because the public exposure of the parents generated an incessant dripping of false leads.
The British media formed a pineapple with the pair of doctors as soon as the disappearance occurred. Three days after the complaint, the circus was already installed next to the Ocean Club. This newspaper visited that week Praia da Luz; There were 33 reporters from Sky News and 18 from the BBC. Sky had had access to the news of the kidnapping before the Portuguese police, according to a police source confirms: "Someone of the circle of the McCanns telephoned from the Ocean Club the night of the crime to the delegate of Sky News in the Algarve. Produced at 10:11 p.m. We received notice of the disappearance half an hour later, at 22.40 ".
Shortly before, at 10:00 pm, a neighbor who later testified before the police offered to call the National Guard upon learning that the girl was not there. "Kate, Madeleine's mother, told him that it was not necessary, that they had already called them," police said.
That initial lie, and other contradictory testimony in the statements of parents and friends who dined together that evening in the Tapas restaurant caught the attention of the police from day one. "An ill-told story," titled the News Diary on the 5th, when Maddie was barely one among the thousands of children who disappear every year in the world.
"There were many strange things," recapitulates an agent. "The mother told the neighbor that they had already called us and it was not true, she said that someone had come in from outside but the shutter was forced from within, they said that every half hour they were going to control the children but the restaurant employees denied it ". For the police, the most surprising thing was that the parents' first concern alerted the press to the police. It also struck them that Kate asked the reception of the Ocean Club the telephone of the priest of the town.
With the British cameras witnessed, the McCanns and their friends, people from the north in a southern town near Africa, began to criticize the methods of the police: that they delayed arriving at the apartment for almost an hour and that they destroyed evidence by taking all The prints with the same pair of gloves. The Algarve police, a very safe place that hundreds of thousands of British tourists arrive every year, knew what was expected: an English victim, English suspects, English tabloids ... "With that we always tell," says a sack of a command regional.
The agents chose to withstand the downpour. There was no other, although they knew that something smelled very badly in the surroundings of the girl's parents and that statistics do not usually deceive: child abductions in occupied buildings are practically non-existent.
Along with the troop of journalists, the British ambassador to Lisbon, John Buck, arrived in Praia de Luz; Shree Dodd, the first communications adviser sent by the Foreign Office, to be replaced weeks later by Mitchell, and several Scotland Yard agents. Buck asked for trust in the police. Dodd began to spread the official slogan of kidnapping around the world. Mitchell sped the machine. The slogans came up (find Madeleine, give us back to Madeleine, we know she's alive, we will not leave a stone unturned ...), the web page was improved, the journeys of faith began. The cold desolation of Kate, her beauty stolen by misfortune, her extreme thinness, began to forge the image of a new Lady Di.
For two months, police were forced to investigate hundreds of bullies. Supposed sightings came from everywhere. Cyprus, Malta, Holland, Greece, Buenos Aires, Belgium ... One day at the end of May there were more than 200 complaints. One of the most reliable was a Norwegian citizen who said she saw Maddie with an Arab-looking man at a gas station in Marrakech. He forgot to mention one detail; Her husband was from Leicestershire, the county where the McCanns live.
Slowly, the tension subsided, the case languished. The McCanns had convinced the world. It was a rapture, and there seemed no hope. After declaring a formal suspect and unsuccessfully investigating Robert Murat, an Anglo-Portuguese neighbor of Praia da Luz who worked as a translator for the police, the hypothesis of her death began to take shape. Scotland Yard suggested sending two dogs (Eddie, seven-year-old Keela of three) specializing in detecting remains of blood and corpse odor. The Spaniels, who have helped solve more than 200 crimes in Britain and the United States, found both: in the apartment and in the car rented by the McCanns. Police Conclusion: In the house happened an accident or perhaps an incident, Madeleine died, parents and friends decided to hide the corpse and feign a kidnapping,
"They probably got scared, they thought that no one would understand that being doctors had killed the girl, they did not know how to explain that they had gone drinking for three hours leaving the children alone," says a police source. "In addition, they had a reputation to defend."
Who among them? Gerry McCann, the ice-look cardiologist, had one. "We immediately realized that he had powerful friends, he apparently aspired to an important position in the Ministry of Health, he hoped to make a political career ... That should have weighed on his decision," reflects a police source.
British Foreign and Interior ministers have reiterated that this is not a political case. The Portuguese prime minister affirmed the same day before this newspaper. The fact is that some citizens have begun sending letters and e-mails to their parliamentarians and Downing Street to protest the close ties between Mitchell and the McCanns. Readers of the online newspaper Mirror.co.uk are outraged. "The McCanns will return to the UK, the press will support them to the point of nausea." Dissenting voices could be ignored in the pages of newspaper letters and in comments to their electronic editions (which Has already passed.) The uninformed public will support its fight against the Portuguese police and the defamatory media Finally,
To this day, Maddie is still missing. We have met her, we have seen her photos, her smile, her videos, her rectangular iris. We will remember her for a long time. Will we ever know the truth? Will it appear to say the last word?
* This article appeared in the print edition of Thursday, September 13, 2007
EL PAÍS
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