Madeleine McCann: Scotland Yard Opens "Formal Investigation"

Scotland Yard, meaning the Metropolitan Police Service of London, UK, has announced the opening of a "formal investigation" into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. They had been conducting a review of the case for the last year or so.


www.bbc.co.uk...

Scotland Yard says it has "new evidence and new theories" in the Madeleine McCann case as it opens a formal investigation into her disappearance.

The Met Police said it still believed there was a chance Madeleine was alive and was investigating 38 "persons of interest" after reviewing the evidence.

Madeleine's parents, Gerry and Kate McCann, said the shift from review to investigation was "a big step forward".

Their statement gives the appearance of an accounting, for accounting purposes, of activities undertaken at public expense.

The Met said its review of tens of thousands of documents had "generated in excess of 3,800 actions", which in turn had "generated new findings and new witness evidence".

The 38 "persons of interest," who include 12 British nationals, are from five European countries - Portugal, the UK and three unnamed others.

Detectives say they need to find out more information and collect evidence on them and are not anticipating any immediate arrests.

The 12 UK nationals, who are not all currently in the UK, are believed to have been in Portugal at the time of Madeleine's disappearance.

At least the public are being told roughly what they got for their tax pounds.

Finding Madeleine is taking on the appearance of a permanent branch of the civil service.

It is interesting that the BBC website article notes that:

A foreign national resident abroad could not be prosecuted in the UK for any possible crime that may be linked to Madeleine's disappearance.

This points to a fact which must be obvious to the police in the UK but which the public may not completely appreciate. That is, that a "formal investigation" by police in the UK of a crime that occurred in Portugal depends very much on the opening of formal investigations in Portugal and on the European continent by other police forces.

Do these other police forces share the faith of the British police in the stories told by Kate and Gerry McCann? Are their political administrators and their taxpayers willing to put more time and money into the Madeleine investigation? Or, did they make up their minds about this case a long time ago?

Scotland Yard has 38 "persons of interest" that they want to focus on with a view to advancing the hunt for Madeleine. Of these, 12 are UK nationals. These are the only 12 that Scotland Yard could prosecute in the event that convincing evidence against them could be found.

That represents 31.5% of the "persons of interest".

Given an assumed lack of interest in pursuing this case by police departments and taxpayers abroad and the fact that arrests and prosecutions are possible by Scotland Yard among only 31.5% of persons of interest to the police, it is difficult to understand why the case of Madeleine McCann has not been consigned to the "cold case file", to await, like other cases of its kind, developments of a completely fortuitous nature.

Why are the McCanns so inexplicably, ineluctably, uniquely special?

Something doesn't quite add up ever since day one when Maddie went missing. I think there is more to this than what meets the eye....

A great shame for the little girl, I just hope that she is is safe, wherever she is and that one day she will be found and back where she belongs......

Fingers crossed........

This case is like a WW1 battlefield, pitted with craters caused by detonations of one sort or another. A recent case of the recovery of three girls given up for dead in the United States raises hopes in the affair, but there is so much else of an ambiguous nature in the way events unfolded that the case screams subterfuge from almost any standpoint.

Personally, I think Madeleine is dead and that her body will never be found. How she came to her end has been speculated upon intensely. When put under the microscope, nobody looks good in this investigation.

The psychology of Kate and Gerry McCann is a study in itself, and, speaking personally, their personal behavior, statements, and conduct after May 3, 2007 have not convinced me that they were not involved in Madeleine's disappearance.

I'm sick and tired of hearing about McCann, thousands of children go missing every single year - can they not focus on one that not been dead for 5 bloody years!

Every child should be afforded endless resources to find them. Trillions go into killing each other on this planet, and I think this could be turned into something good if its used to raise awareness that prompts governments to make looking for missing children a greater priority.


It can also serve as a lesson to what to do or not to do if your child goes missing. We can't know for sure other kids aren't being looked for just as hard; only each new lead isn't shared with the world. Personally I would be using the media very carefully. This sort of work should largely be conducted in an inconspicuous manner with media meant to keep people looking and even diverting attention to keep the scent trail open. I think this child went far underground whether dead or alive a long time ago due to the sharing of each sighting as they happened or was dumped by the side of the road to fend for herself.

I saw a YouTube video only about a month ago of a documentary of seemingly homeless children who looked as young as 8 who were soliciting sex in pretty much a slum. They looked dirty, confussed, and homeless. All are Asian but in one part you can see a young white girl with light blonde/brown hair told by another child to run and hide. You get a glimpse for a minute and I immediately thought of Madeleine. I tried to slow it down and clean it up but she moves so quickly to duck behind the wall as if she's been told to do this with cameras that its impossible (for me to do). The other girls didnt run and hide. In fact after they get this girl hidden they stand as almost guards staring at the camera. I don't know what it means but it was a red flag for me.

Originally posted by davethebear
Something doesn't quite add up ever since day one when Maddie went missing. I think there is more to this than what meets the eye....

A great shame for the little girl, I just hope that she is is safe, wherever she is and that one day she will be found and back where she belongs......

Fingers crossed........

I agree with you, I feel that her parents are not as innocent as they claim,however,perhaps now that Scotland yard have taken on the investigation, the truth will out.

reply to post by ipsedixit


I'm probably gonna get a lot of flack for this but if i am totally honest i believe that she isn't alive anymore and i believe in my heart that her parents had something to do with it. let me give you my theory again this is only a theory and one that i think is possible.

It has been reported that Madeleine McCann and the other children were left asleep in the holiday home/flat while their parents went for a meal, this is where my theory would begin, i think that the parents might have given the kids something extra to help them sleep, like a piece of sleeping table or something (Which i have had done to me as a kid, im not saying there is something wrong with that), i think that they went for the meal then while checking up on the kids the mother (who i think was first) discovered that Madeleine wasn't breathing and died.

she called her husband (or vice versa for the purpose of this theory it isn't important) who came in and saw it, when they tried to bring her back and couldn't they decided that they had to come up with a reason, or some explanation so they thought of the whole Maddy being gone thing and the man that they saw, then they somehow got her body out of the building and buried it in the nearby church grounds (apparently there is a holy law that says a body on church grounds cannot be exhumed).

they now continue to live this lie to this day and secretly hope that they are never found out.

Now remember this is just a theory and my belief, i cant help it but i believe either they knew something or did something, just look at how the father reacts in the early interviews and later interviews, he barely shows emotion in the first few then cries in the later and again nearer to when the media stopped watching he began to cry more. the mother seems to be genuine.

anyway just a theory. any comments?

Why are the McCanns so inexplicably, ineluctably, uniquely special?

This is the thing which keeps on standing out for me. What is it that makes them so? Would working class parents have been treated the same?

If one of my children went missing, I would be running about the place in a panic crying and shouting out exactly that - please help me, my child's gone missing, someone has taken my child - not "they've" taken her. This to me seems to suggest that they already know the person/people who took Maddie, or they are at least in-part familiar with that person/group. Who is the "they" she was referring to? It also suggests the parents had some foreknowledge of what was about to happen, like they were expecting it or it had been planned.

And then everything that followed just seemed to be way out and not sitting right somehow.

Originally posted by Danny85
reply to post by ipsedixit

 

I'm probably gonna get a lot of flack for this but if i am totally honest i believe that she isn't alive anymore and i believe in my heart that her parents had something to do with it. let me give you my theory again this is only a theory and one that i think is possible.

It has been reported that Madeleine McCann and the other children were left asleep in the holiday home/flat while their parents went for a meal, this is where my theory would begin, i think that the parents might have given the kids something extra to help them sleep, like a piece of sleeping table or something (Which i have had done to me as a kid, im not saying there is something wrong with that), i think that they went for the meal then while checking up on the kids the mother (who i think was first) discovered that Madeleine wasn't breathing and died.

she called her husband (or vice versa for the purpose of this theory it isn't important) who came in and saw it, when they tried to bring her back and couldn't they decided that they had to come up with a reason, or some explanation so they thought of the whole Maddy being gone thing and the man that they saw, then they somehow got her body out of the building and buried it in the nearby church grounds (apparently there is a holy law that says a body on church grounds cannot be exhumed).

they now continue to live this lie to this day and secretly hope that they are never found out.

Now remember this is just a theory and my belief, i cant help it but i believe either they knew something or did something, just look at how the father reacts in the early interviews and later interviews, he barely shows emotion in the first few then cries in the later and again nearer to when the media stopped watching he began to cry more. the mother seems to be genuine.

anyway just a theory. any comments?

Hi, Are you stating that bodies cannot be exhumed from a grave yard by law in Portugal, or anywhere in europe/the world? I am only asking, I thought that many bodies had been exhumed when investigating other crimes in the past. I just wanted to clarify the legalities around exhuming bodies etc, as I am not sure myself around this issue...

But I also agree with you when you state that they did something to the kids to settle them down for the night, but then something happened that they didn't expect to happen and then they tried to take the matter into their own hands...

I find it all quite puzzling, especially after so many years have passed, I don't understand why New Scotland Yard weren't involved from the off, but I suppose it has something to do with one country treading on another countries toes.....

reply to post by davethebear


it was something i remember a man on the news saying so i think it might be in Portugal. he was asked about the girl being buried in a cemetery and he said that they would need to seek permission from the church leader but didn't expect to get it as it was concentrated grounds. im not sure either about the law of it but i think its something to do with their religious views maybe.

Thanks for the responses. I might get back to some of them but I'm on my way out the door right now.

In normal police practice, as far as I understand it, every case reaches a cut off point where it is deemed to have gone "cold". It is put on the shelf by the police, who simply must move on to other, fresher cases in order to try to solve them while they are still warm at least.

The McCanns may cite cases where children have been found after many years, but I should think that most if not all of these cases are cold cases which have been on the shelf for years.

Circumstances solve them.

Unexpected revelations or suspicions are made known by witnesses who have noticed something. Sometimes an abductor lets his guard down and a child escapes. Sometimes a persistent police officer has his own personal file of cold cases that he warms over from time to time and pokes into.

It is hard to see how a relentless police investigation of a crime, in which key witnesses are not available to do a reconstruction of the events, can be expected to yield results.

To my knowledge there has been no thorough elimination of the principals in this case as culprits. That is very troubling. (Anyway, gotta go.)

Something doean't sit right with the whole thing with me,i don't want to point fingers & blame certain people but the investigation form start to finish was a complete shambles,evidence was probably lost with all the people running around the flat,no comunication between english & portugese police..a shambles.

i really hope she's found someday but i don't think she will sadly

reply to post by ipsedixit

it is difficult to understand why the case of Madeleine McCann has not been consigned to the "cold case file", to await, like other cases of its kind, developments of a completely fortuitous nature. Why are the McCanns so inexplicably, ineluctably, uniquely special?

The case, as I understand it, was investigated by the Portuguese authorities, not the UK ones.
I think that the Portuguese Police only recently announced that they are no longer investigating the case, so it is effectively in the "cold case file" of the original investigating authority.

The UK police did not want to undermine the authority of the the Portuguese, so did not conduct their own full formal investigation of the case until the Portuguese officially declared that they were no longer investigating.

Since that has only happened in the last few months, the case is still "warm" as far as the UK authorities are concerned. The fact that they have turned up so many new leads in a relatively short space of time would tend to back up the widely held viewpoint that the Portuguese authorities did not investigate all possible scenarios properly.
It was fairly obvious that the Portuguese authorities believed (at the time) that the McCanns themselves were responsible, and their investigations seemed to focus on that possibility, to the neglect of other possible avenues of investigation.

The McCanns made the decision to try and use the media to assist with finding their missing child. This may have backfired for them, but at the time - if they genuinely had nothing to do with the disappearance - and suspecting that the authorities weren't doing all they could, they may have felt that it was their only course of action.

I know if one of my kids was missing, I'd still be looking, and probably trying to get everyone else to look too.

There are thousands of missing children, and the McCanns aren't "special" - they just got more publicity than most, and are still apparently "newsworthy" today.

I genuinely don't know what to believe. But I hope that Madeleine is alive and well, and found soon.

Personally Madies dead in my view....quite a lot of the parents story doesn't add up from what i remember such as the entire group of adults not giving evidence of what happened that night etc

And as for concerned parents i'd expect more wailing and breaking bones on rocks...they seem more like some middle class people who've lost a pet gerbil and want to put enough effort in to keep the kids distracted from the fact the cat doesn't fancy its tea tonight

This story and how it has been dragged out by the McCanns for 6 years is a strange one to say the least.

Although I haven't looked into this case in great detail it seems poor Maddie was left alone in an apartment with her 2 younger siblings (Maddie was 4 and the twins were little more than 1 year old). The McCanns basically left their children to go eating and drinking with friends. Out of sight and perhaps out of mind?

The day it hit the press there were an awful lot of people taken in by the softly, softly approach of the UK media and very sympathetic stance towards the parents. When perhaps a builder and cleaner from one of Britain's inner cities would have been given a much rougher ride?

However, there were also many others wanting to know why Kate and Gerry were not arrested for neglect in the days that followed. Even if a lot of that talk didn't make the media. They left children incapable of looking after themselves alone and unsupervised. To many this was totally unacceptable. But the media keep serving us up the same sad story of parents who have had a child abducted without ever mentioning that one small fact that the parents actions made the whole episode possible.

Whilst poor Madeleine is the tragic victim of all this we have to ask what the underlying factors are behind the the actions of the UK media and police in seemingly portraying the parents as victims of a horrendous crime?

Why are the McCanns being given very special treatment? From the failure to even investigate a case of neglect to the continual promotion of this case year after year when so many other children go missing and their stories are ignored.

Yes it's a strange one.

Originally posted by Danny85
reply to post by ipsedixit

 

I'm probably gonna get a lot of flack for this but if i am totally honest i believe that she isn't alive anymore and i believe in my heart that her parents had something to do with it. let me give you my theory again this is only a theory and one that i think is possible.

It has been reported that Madeleine McCann and the other children were left asleep in the holiday home/flat while their parents went for a meal, this is where my theory would begin, i think that the parents might have given the kids something extra to help them sleep, like a piece of sleeping table or something (Which i have had done to me as a kid, im not saying there is something wrong with that), i think that they went for the meal then while checking up on the kids the mother (who i think was first) discovered that Madeleine wasn't breathing and died. .......

........Now remember this is just a theory and my belief, i cant help it but i believe either they knew something or did something, just look at how the father reacts in the early interviews and later interviews, he barely shows emotion in the first few then cries in the later and again nearer to when the media stopped watching he began to cry more. the mother seems to be genuine.

anyway just a theory. any comments?

Your theory is quite similar to that of the so called 'bungling' Portuguese police, although their version involves a fridge and a hire car too. Interesting that all the McCann's friends were doctors and had left their children unattended too. Why were they all so sure there children wouldn't get up?
You might also want to focus on the night before Kate McCann said she discovered her daughter was missing where a child was heard crying for hours and then suddenly stopped as the patio doors were opened, a night where the McCanns made many calls and messages, then deleted them.

I'm hoping Scotland yard are considering the facts and not going for a whitewash. They might even ask Kate McCann the 49 questions she refused to answer.....or maybe not.

I've started several threads on this subject, the most wide ranging being Madeleine McCann: Vector Addition. I know some things about the case but I am not as knowledgeable as a few bloggers who have read and studied all the police files and "rogatory" statements thoroughly.

One of the things that led to a lot of confusion right from the outset was the McCann's attempts to avoid being charged with some version of "neglect". They appear to have made several glaringly inaccurate statements, not to call them lies. The net effect of this was very damaging to them in everyone's eyes.

People who want to get into some of the nitty gritty of the case should read the "Vector Addition" thread. It's a roller coaster ride.

In a sense, the McCanns seem to have gotten caught between a rock (neglect) and a hard space (responsible vigilance). If they were as vigilant as they said, it would be nearly impossible for someone to get into the apartment to kidnap a child undetected. If they actually were not that vigilant, and someone had a window of opportunity to kidnap Madeleine, the McCanns would leave themselves open to a charge of neglect.

Losing Madeleine to a kidnapper is one thing, but then to lose the rest of your professional life and possibly your other children to a charge of parental neglect would lead one to say anything that came to mind in a bid to avoid that alternative.

Jane Tanner saw someone with a child during her check. So their system worked, technically. Like one of those successful operations where the patient died. The system just wasn't implemented by serious people.

And then there is the Smith Family sighting that tends to put Jane Tanner's sighting into question. And why didn't Aoife (ee-fa) Smith, who said in her rogatory statement to the Policia Judiciaria, that she had seen the face of the man carrying the little blonde girl ever do an E-FIT drawing of that person?

It goes on and on. There are numerous absurdities and anomalies in this story.

Personally, I don't see how Scotland Yard can do any good in this case without a parallel or joint investigation by the PJ.

Job One in my opinion, is a reconstruction of the events of the evening in which all the original members of the "Tapas 9" participate.

The one area where Scotland Yard might clarify matters, in my opinion, is with regard to participation by politically connected people in England, starting probably the day before Madeleine was announced by Kate to have gone missing.

I was never really that interested in this case except what the papers fed us ( usually by the low quality red-tops that were lying about in the works canteen), so you have to say everything was taken with a pinch of salt.

The one aspect I was drawn to was the private detective firms that have been hired by the McCanns over the years and the amount of crap they have spun over the years following what happened.

In some cases it looks like they were feeding mis-information, in others it is just out-right fraud.

Here is s good article detailing it ( warning : it is a very long read)

The McCanns’ private investigators – we investigate

In any case, I wouldn't like to be the police if you have to wade through all this crap.

reply to post by Knobby

I haven't read your linked article yet, but I will.

You bring up a very good point though, regarding the manner in which the McCanns themselves have conducted their own investigation.

They seem to have hired some very disreputable people, almost as if it didn't matter who they hired. Make of that what you will.

They publicized Madeleine's coloboma over the very sensible and serious objections of the PJ. It turns out that all the sightings reported were of little blonde girls with no coloboma. So who was right on that one?

Stepping back one might say that the McCanns are incompetent investigators. Is that an unfair assessment?

And yet they still seem to be calling the tune in the hunt for Madeleine. What is the reason for that?

reply to post by ipsedixit


I can't say as to how much the McCanns were involved with hiring these agencies, but to me it seems that most of them saw the gravy train, certainly in the case of the firm Metodo 3.

The original reason I looked into this was Brian Kennedy, who was looking to buy Glasgow Rangers football club. Someone mentioned on a messageboard that he was bankrolled the above firm and it looks like he involved himself with taking part in stakeouts and witness interogations. To such an extent that one witness even turned hostile against the police.

I'm hoping that this will be part of the Mets remit into the investigation.

TBH I think it's sad that people will use a missing girl to line their pockets.