It’s called “Madeleine McCann” Collateral Damage and it promises “new facts” in the decade-long mystery over the three-year-old who went missing from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz.
But far from setting out to solve the puzzle, the project is designed to set the record straight, says its author – redress some of the consequences of the media circus that has blighted lives since that fateful day in May, 2007.
Written by Sergey Malinka, the book is essentially his way of trying to move on. The 33-year-old computer technician has just become a father. He wants his two-month-old son to be able to live a normal life, he told the Resident. He doesn’t want his child to type his father’s name into a search engine in a few years time and simply see hundreds of references to Malinka’s so-called involvement in the disappearance of the world’s most famous missing person.
Although drawn into the mystery from the start – even being re-interviewed as an arguido (‘formal suspect’) six years later – Malinka has been formally dropped from police inquiries.
He has in the past also successfully sued for defamation in the press.
But the shadow of this seemingly endless mystery has dogged his life for far too long.
The arrival of his son, along with belief that “still there are no conclusive leads”, has led him to take the initiative and write his story.
In Malinka’s online pitch on KickStarter – a kind of crowd-funding platform for creative projects – he explains that he has chosen this way of getting the book out as “we know, from the past 10 years, that whatever you write could be banned from the public access”.
He believes KickStarter will ensure “the book will be released and people will get it in the original state”.
It has “a lot of sensitive information”, he added, along with “the most revealing details about my story” … “all the difficulties, the bribery, the threatening, the blackmailing, the defamation and just general aggravation from public that I have passed through”.
Indeed, the Russian who now has Portuguese nationality says he hopes the story – edited by local resident and author David S. Jones – will help anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation in the future and “doesn’t know what to do”.
In Malinka’s case, the past led him to the depths of despair, he explains.
“For 10 years I’ve kept quiet hoping to see some closure, but now I see that without my input this would never stop”.
By ‘this’ he refers to the slurs against his name that remain ‘out there’ in the ether, unchallenged.
“Madeleine McCann” Collateral Damage means to change all that, and anyone interested in supporting this initiative can read more about it via:
