The theory that Madeleine McCann was abducted by a local man, now dead, has finally collapsed.
Mainstream media began buzzing about “junkie and ex-jailbird Euclides Monteiro” over a year ago – with British journalists flying over to the Algarve to stake out the little village of Portelas, near Lagos, where the former Ocean Club employee was understood to have lived.
As Monteiro was revealed to have died in a tractor accident in 2009, it was “open season” with various newspapers describing him as a key suspect, a petty thief with heroin habit, a man you “could not trust”.
Now, after all the innuendo, Jornal de Notícias has carried a report saying that DNA evidence has ruled Euclides out.
PJ police still working on the theory that Madeleine was abducted by a sexual predator have found no evidence to link her disappearance with the dead man.
“The name Euclides Monteiro did not fall from the sky and was convenient because he was deceased”, an officer told the Guardian earlier this year.
According to JN, it was the PJ’s suspicions of Monteiro that lead them to reopen the Portuguese investigation into the toddler’s disappearance.
His mobile phone was logged as being active in the area on the night that Madeleine disappeared, he was a former employee at the Ocean Club – apparently sacked for petty thieving – and his description matched that of a suspect sought for alleged sex attacks on British children in the Algarve between 2004-2006.
A semem sample recovered from one of the attacks was tested against Euclides own DNA, but, as JN revealed last week, it has been found to be different. As there was also no DNA evidence linking Euclides with the McCann’s Ocean Club apartment, the dead man’s family’s claim that he was being used as a scapegoat would appear to hold some weight.
JN reports that “no further developments” of the PJ’s investigation are known.
Meantime, British police conducting a parallel investigation are due back in the Algarve to interview new ‘suspects’ within the next couple of weeks.
