Today (Sunday) saw Sky News once again heavily feature new ‘revelations’ from the soon-to-be-released book Looking for Madeleine, written by Pulitzer prize finalist Anthony Summers and his fourth wife, investigative journalist Robbyn Swan.
But as the ‘revelations’ revealed themselves to be facts in the public domain since at least 2009, former PJ police inspector Carlos Anjos has penned a damning article claiming the objective of the current Scotland Yard investigation into Madeleine’s seven-year disappearance has “never been to find out what happened to Maddie”.
Instead, he maintains, it has “always been to remove suspicions of the McCanns”.
Concentrating solely on facts, the only clear truth coming out of today’s stories is that the ‘revelations’ in Looking for Madeleine are “nothing new” – and that Sky news appears to be doing one heck of a PR job.
As a commentator who has followed the mystery closely since day one confided: “I doubt if Summers and Swan would call them revelations, but we´ll soon see”.
Looking for Madeleine is due to go on sale on Tuesday September 11, and certainly hundreds if not thousands of readers are eagerly waiting to read it.
A former British policeman told us today: “Will it address Gerry McCann’s change of story about his point of entry? Will it address Kate’s change of story about the curtains? Will it address their telling all the relatives that the shutters were smashed open? Will it give a coherent scenario which includes all the known facts? Will it address the dogs’ alerts over items associated with the McCanns and to no others?”
According to Amazon, “award-winning authors Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan have produced the first independent, objective account of the case” and have demonstrated that “speculation that the McCann’s played a role in their daughter’s fate” is unfounded.
Cataloguing the “string of sexual assaults and burglaries” that had been reported in the Algarve before Madeleine went missing, Anthony Summers is quoted by Sky News as suggesting Kate and Gerry McCann should have been warned by their tour operators Mark Warner Ltd when they checked in for their family holiday at the Ocean Club in Praia da Luz at the end of April, 2007.
“Had there been a warning note in the apartment, do we think the McCanns would have left the patio door unlocked on the night they went to the other side of the pool to have dinner away from their children?
“One would be tempted to think they would make sure everything was firmly locked up.”
As the Sky news report repeats itself throughout the day, elsewhere in the Portuguese media Carlos Anjos, currently president of the Commission for the Protection of Victims of Crimes, writes at length on his theory that multi-million pound police investigation Operation Grange has always set out to clear the McCann parents of any suspicions in their daughter’s disappearance.
“One of the doubts that persist is understanding why the British police have insisted in repeating PJ police investigations, and have never tried to effect the only one the PJ did not do: the reconstruction”, he explains – stressing that the much-publicised BBC Crimewatch programme that purported to reconstruct the events leading up to Madeleine’s disappearance was a “travesty” of the facts.
Addressing the alerts to blood traces and cadaver odours in the family’s apartment thrown up by sniffer dogs Eddie and Keela in 2007, Anjos writes: “I believe that these two dogs, seven years on, are either dead, under lock and key, or have certainly been retired from police duty as a result of their work in Portugal”.
It is a sweeping statement, with apparently no proof to back it up.
Swan, in interview with Sky News, points out that cadaver dog alerts always require the back up of solid forensic evidence – which, in this case, has not been forthcoming.
In other words, today’s ‘revelations’ and media stories, both here and abroad, have just added to all the others swirling in the vortex of questions about what really happened to Madeleine McCann.
With no ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ likely as a result of Summers and Swan’s new book, there is nonetheless an apparent “positive note” in conclusion.
According to the Sky News report: “Quoting American statistics, it (the book) says that only 4% of missing children of Madeleine’s age are not located, and more than half of them – 56% – are recovered alive”.
Meanwhile, Carlos Anjos concludes his article in today’s Domingo supplement of Correio da Manhã with the only firm conviction of which he says he has “no doubt”:
“The English (police) will stop (their investigation) on the day in which the Portuguese authorities say: enough. And, on this day, the British police will say they did not discover what happened (to Madeleine) because the Portuguese authorities did not let them”.
By Natasha Donn
