2023-04-23 09:11:55
Madeleine McCann disappeared on May 3, 2007. The little British girl, who was about to turn four, was spending the summer with her family in the quiet town of Praia da Luz, in the Portuguese Algarve. Her parents had rented apartment 5A of the Ocean Club tourist complex, where the events took place on the night.
The marriage was in the crosshairs of the Portuguese police From the beginning. Not only because statistically it is very likely that the person responsible for the disappearance of a minor belongs to the immediate environment, but because the investigators had already classified them as bad parents and they didn’t trust them.
When Maddie was taken away, the girl was sleeping with her twin brothers—Sean and Amelie—in the apartment. Her parents had left them alone while enjoying a dinner with friends at a nearby restaurant. They had done this several nights—both they and the rest of the couples in the group that had children—and nothing had happened.
According to what they said, they rotated to make surveillance rounds every 20-30 minutes and thus check that the little ones (a total of eight) were okay. Kate McCann explained in her book that —in addition— every night they asked to be reserved the same table: from the one where they could see each other the best the apartments. Something that they now regret because it could have been what motivated her captor to go after her, says the New York Post.
Her husband, Gerry, stated that the Tapas restaurant was so close that It did not seem “different to having dinner in the garden at home”. But the then chief inspector of the Portuguese Judicial Police, Gonzalo Amaral, did not agree with anything he was told. Neither they nor his friends. He saw in his versions a kind of plot or conspiracy to cover up the possible accidental death of the British girl.
This would have been very difficult to maintain over time. Even so, it was supported by newspapers and television that contributed to creating a terrible image of the McCann couple in public opinion, which went from pitying them to condemning them. Some of these media have denounced in a Netflix documentary that the Portuguese police conveniently leaked information to them about the case that they now know to be false.
The objective of these leaks was none other than to generate in their readers/audience the sensation of that Maddie’s parents were guilty of his death and who knows if he could make the marriage collapse and end up confessing. In fact, They came to offer them a deal in exchange for acknowledging that the little girl had died accidentally and they had hidden her body.
When the Portuguese police reported that they were “investigating the possibility that she is dead,” they actually took it for granted and their investigations were aimed at proving that Kate and Gerry were responsible, whom Amaral saw as fakes. But your hypotheses they were pure speculation. They were based on traces of blood detected by the sniffer dogs, which they could never prove to be Madeleine’s.
What evidence did they have against them?
Amaral thought that surveillance system that the tour group claimed to have to control the children it was an invention and that those present at the dinner had prepared together a version of the events that they would maintain in their statements to the police. A “Silence pact“, published some tabloids induced by their police sources. Such was the distrust of the Portuguese investigators that they examined everyone’s cars they. A dozen vehicles from the McCanns’ environment.
sniffer dogs they detected blood in the apartment 5A from the Ocean Club Resort and in the car that the McCanns rented after the disappearance of the girl. According to his spokeswoman, 25 days later. So the Portuguese police believed that Maddie died accidentally that night, that her parents – with the complicity of their friends – hid the body somewhere (possibly a freezer) and then transported it in that vehicle to the place where it was found. supposes that days later they left him.
There was speculation about the possibility that the marriage had administered to the children any medication so they would stay asleep and with Maddie they would have gotten out of hand. Without going any further, Amaral drops into the aforementioned Netflix documentary that he found it “strange” that the twins won’t wake up the night she disappeared his sister, despite the uproar and the constant movement of people.
Most of these statements already appear in the book that the former inspector published in 2008 and that he would have kept until the recording of the interview for the series The disappearance of Madeleine McCann which premiered in 2019. All despite the fact that the final report of DNA analysis – of the three samples taken where the dogs marked that there could be blood – rejected the possibility that the fluids could be from the missing minor.
Amaral’s Crusade
The one who was head of the Portuguese Judicial Police when Maddie disappeared even accused British researchers of favoring marriage McCann following only the lines of investigation that excluded them as responsible for the facts. The tension between the two countries that generated his words led to his dismissal. Gonzalo Amaral was removed from the case in October 2007 and subsequently took early retirement (at the age of 48).
After his departure from the body, the battle against the McCanns it has been harder if it fits. In July 2008, she published the book and started a campaign to clean up her image, which inexorably tarnished that of Madeleine’s parents. Kate and Gerry ended up denouncing him before the Portuguese courts, which even prohibited the sale of the book and sentenced him in 2015 for defamation to the payment of 500,000 euros to the couple, as damages.
However, the decision was annulled by the Supreme Court two years later, considering that what harmed them It was not the book or Amaral’s words, but the fact that they were formal suspects Of the investigation. It should be remembered that 127 days after Maddie’s disappearance —in September 2007—, Kate McCann is told that she is defendant —formal suspect in Portugal. And a day later Gerry too.
Are they still suspicious?
The Portuguese police present their final report in July 2008, at which point they acknowledge that they have no evidence to incriminate the McCanns. At that time, the investigation against the marriage was filed and their status as suspects is lifted.
To this day, the UK Metropolitan Police still consider Madeleine McCann to be “missing”, given that they do not have conclusive evidence of her possible death. However, the Braunschweig City Prosecutor’s Office (Germany) left the little girl for dead in June 2020.
In April 2022, the German Christian Brueckner was formally charged of the disappearance of the little girl. Today, he—a sexual predator with a long criminal record—is the only defendant in the case from Madeleine. When they took her, he lived approximately 3 kilometers from the complex where the McCanns vacationed and the location of her mobile phone places him in the area.
He is currently serving a sentence in his country. for drug trafficking and rape —to a 72-year-old woman in 2005, precisely in Praia da Luz—. And, last October, the Brunswick Prosecutor’s Office accused him of five new sex crimes (two of them to minors), which he would have committed between 2000 and 2017 in Portugal. However, could get out of jail in 2025.
The Brunswick regional court in northern Germany has decided that not “competent” because the defendant’s “last known address” was in another state, Saxony-Anhalt. Consequently, the trial – which was due to start imminently – has been cancelled.
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