As Kate and Gerry McCann woke up to the 11th birthday of their missing daughter Madeleine, news reports brought some bizarre new twists in the high-profile seven-year investigation.
According to Expresso newspaper, the Public Prosecutor has at last served papers on South-African businessman Stephen Birch – the man who hit the headlines in 2012 after declaring that he had found Madeleine’s body, using ground-penetrating radar, on a private property in Praia da Luz.
As newspapers wrote at the time, Birch had no authorisation to search the property and had done so under cloak of darkness.
Now, the Public Prosecutor has apparently charged him with the crime of “intrusion in an area fenced off from the public, punishable with a maximum jail term of three months in prison,” claims Público.
Birch is reported to be ready to come to Portugal for the trial, and continues to maintain that Madeleine’s body lies 500 mm below the surface of a newly-laid driveway, metres from the Ocean Club apartment from which she went missing.
In time with this latest twist – and while British tabloids were running old stories of a 68-year-old paedophile being interviewed in jail – Portugal’s tabloid equivalent, the Correio da Manhã, revealed that the PJ police has sanctioned the Met’s request for searches of various sites in Praia da Luz, but has not yet decided “whether the means to be used will be exclusively English”.
“Scotland Yard wants to use geo-radar and sniffer dogs, as well as British forensic teams,” writes Sol website. “But the decision is in the hands of the PJ, which also has radar, bought four years ago, able to capture images in the subsoil”.
The radar has already been used in a number of cases, including during searches for the bodies of the victims of “King Ghob”, adds Sol (Francisco Leitão, a.k.a. Rei Ghob, is currently serving 25 years for the murders of four young Portuguese).
“If the geo-radar detects something suspicious,” digging will follow, Sol affirms. “The objective is to find Madeleine’s body or other clues, like items of clothing or weapons.”
Nonetheless, the website contends that the PJ has already done a thorough search of all these sites and come up empty-handed.
Meanwhile, TV commentator and critic Eduardo Cintra Torres has criticised the Madeleine razzmatazz that seems to have been stirred up by Scotland Yard in the past two weeks.
Talking on CMTV, Torres claims that Madeleine cop DCI Andy Redwood needs psychological evaluation.
“I look at him, and I just think ‘this man wants to appear on TV’,” Torres told CMTV news anchor João Ferreira.
“With so many children disappearing in England, did he choose the Maddie case because he would appear on television?
“Why are the Portuguese police being subservient to this mockery?” He added. “We need to ask, what exactly is going on? This is all just ridiculous. Just a way of showing off.”
Torres contentions have been echoed elsewhere with critics suggesting the British police are trying to justify the millions spent so far by Operation Grange in the search for Madeleine’s alleged abductor. Others have suggested it is an election ploy of the British government in the run-up to the European elections.
As journalist Len Port writes in his latest blog (www.algarvenewswatch.blogspot.pt) onlookers wonder whether the endless twists and turns in the investigation will simply send it into oblivion.
But whatever the motivation for these latest stories, Torres claims it is “shameful for the Portuguese state to allow the mediatisation of an investigation that belongs to the Portuguese and not to the English.
“If we tried to do the same in England, would they allow it?” He asked. “Of course not!”
