www.mccannfiles.com

Home
Latest News
Maddie or Madeleine?
The McCanns' PDL Media Statements
The Eddie and Keela Searches/Videos
The Eddie and Keela Extended Videos
The Expresso Interview
Kate's Diary
The Huelva Trip
Sky News Crime Scene Picture Galleries
Case Files Released: UK Reports (1)
Case Files Released: UK Reports (2)
Case Files Released: UK Reports (3)
Case Files Released: Portuguese Reports (1)
Case Files Released: Portuguese Reports (2)
Case Files Released: The Sightings (1)
Case Files Released: The Sightings (2)
Case Files Released: Press Comments
The PJ's Final Report - 57 page summary
The PJ's Final Report - Ongoing Summary
The Smith Family Sighting, 03 May 2007
'A Verdade Da Mentira', 'The Truth of the Lie' (1)
'A Verdade Da Mentira', 'The Truth of the Lie' (2)
Gonçalo Amaral - The Interviews (July)
Gonçalo Amaral - The Interviews (Aug/Sep)
Correio da Manhã Exclusive Reports (July)
Correio da Manhã Reports (August)
Madeleine McCann
Gerry McCann
Gerry & Kate's Timeline
Kate McCann
Kate's Interviews
Robert Murat (2007)
Robert Murat (2008)
Murat Libel Settlement
03 May 2007
03/04 May Timeline
04 May 2007
05/06 May 2007
The First Reactions
Pat Perkins/The e-mail
Apartment 5A
Maps/Aerial Shots
The 'Last Photograph'
The 'Abductor'
The 'Eggman'
Cooper's 'Creepyman'
Cuddle Cat/Bear Hunt
Eddie and Keela
Charlotte Pennington
The Tapas Seven
Nannies/Childcare & Najoua Chekaya
Investigating Team
Gonçalo Amaral
Portuguese Penal Code
Método 3
Brian Kennedy
Madeleine 'Sightings'
The Tongeren 'Sighting'
'De Telegraaf' Letter
Alex Woolfall/John Hill
Mrs Pamela Fenn
Ray Wyre
Esther McVey
The Official Site
Madeleine's Fund
Mortgage Payments
The Movie
Vanity Fair Interview
Panorama Transcript
Various Transcripts
CNN Transcripts
O'Donnell/Smith
Misc Videos
Reports Pre-Arguido
Reports Post-Arguido (1)
Reports Post-Arguido (2)
Sol Reports
Misc. Comment 2007
Misc. Comment 2008 (1)
Misc. Comment 2008 (2)
European Campaign
LSE Event 30/01/2008
Express Group Apology
The Brussels Trip
The Strasbourg Trip
HELLO!
El Mundo Article
The Sun Review
Anniversary Interviews (TV)
Anniversary Articles (Media)
Anniversary Articles (Family/Friends)
Anniversary Articles (The Services)
Case To Be Archived? 01/02 July 2008
High Court Hearing 07 July 2008
Arguido Status Lifted - 21 July 2008
Madeleine Related 'Art'
CBS 48 Hours: 'Where's Maddie?'
BBC: 'The Mystery of Madeleine McCann'
Dispatches: 'Searching for Madeleine'
RTP: 'Anatomy of a Mystery'
Sky: 'The Mystery of Madeleine McCann'
MSNBC: 'Missing Madeleine'
ITV1 'Madeleine, One Year On' documentary
Al Jazeera: 'The McCanns v. The Media'
2007: May (1-28)
June (29-58)
July (59-89)
August (90-120)
September (121-150)
October (151-181)
November (182-211)
December (212-242)
2008: January (243-273)
February (274-302)
March (303-333)
April (334 - 363)
May (364-394)
June (395-424)
July (425-455)
August (456-486)
September (487-Date)
Gerry's Blogs (Days 1-58) May/Jun 2007
Gerry's Blogs (Days 59-120) Jul/Aug 2007
Gerry's Blogs (Days 121-181) Sep/Oct 2007
Gerry's Blogs (Days 182-242) Nov/Dec 2007
Gerry's Blogs (Days 243-302) Jan/Feb 2008
Gerry's Blogs (Days 303-363) Mar/Apr 2008
Gerry's Blogs (Days 364-424) May/Jun 2008
Gerry's Blogs (Days 425-486) Jul/Aug 2008
Gerry's Blogs (Days 487-Date) Sep/Oct 2008
Comment/Contact/Links

The Sun Review

Complete review of the case by The Sun newspaper
 
This is a very disappointing review by The Sun, which fails to address any of the serious issues, concerns and inconsistencies inherent within the case.
 
The events of the 'abduction' and Jane Tanner's sighting are skated over with indecent haste in the rush to build up a glowing character reference for the McCanns.

 
Maddie - One year on, 27 April 2008
 
Maddie - One year on The Sun
 
 
'One year since the disappearance of Madeleine McCann The Sun has produced a compelling multimedia special report looking back on the 12 months of a story that has captivated the attention of people around the world.
 
The Sun's Chief Foreign Correspondent Nick Parker, who led our team of reporters in Portugal, provides the background and insight into the still unsolved case of Maddie.'

 
Maddie - A year in the darkness, 28 April 2008
 
Maddie - A year in the darkness The Sun
 
By JOHN PERRY 
Published: 28/04/2008 
 
LISBON, Portugal -- Portuguese police searched Friday for a three-year-old British girl who went missing from an upmarket resort in Southern Portugal where she was on vacation with her family, officials said.
 
WITH one momentous sentence on May 4, 2007, the Associated Press broke one of the biggest news stories of modern times.
 
Almost exactly a year on, it continues to fascinate and horrify. To send chills down the spine of every parent. To turn us all into armchair detectives harbouring pet theories on what really happened.
 
Its complexities, moral and forensic, are still talked about in every home, office and factory, and in every newspaper.
 
None of us had heard of Madeleine McCann until she was already gone. But we feel we know her now.
 
Since last May, millions of words have been written about her disappearance and the continuing torment of her parents Kate and Gerry. In three Sun specials this week, JOHN PERRY sorts the fact from the fiction in the most complete account to date.


THREE weeks short of the first anniversary of Madeleine McCann’s abduction, her mother Kate spoke publicly for the first time in months. Whatever pain she and her husband Gerry continued to endure, she said, was as nothing compared with that of their daughter, which began on May 3, 2007 and which, for all they know, is ongoing.

“The pain of separation, the confusion, the fear, the absolute fear she has had to endure and is still enduring. She is only four years old,” said Kate.

Only four years old. But on May 12 she will be five. Madeleine was three when she last saw her mum and dad.

Her kidnapping, carried out without leaving a trace — at least none Portuguese police have managed to detect — shocked the world.

It was not just the abduction, nightmarish though that was. It was that two parents would leave their children alone in an unlocked apartment in a foreign land while they had dinner nearby. The anger directed at the McCanns was amplified because here were two educated, well-paid doctors who should have known better. For some, their middle-classness worsened their guilt.

They were seen as having led a privileged life, having effortlessly produced three perfect children and then having casually, selfishly left them at the mercy of a predator.

For many reasons this could not be further from the truth.

Kate and Gerry McCann are self-made people, not born to privilege. Kate, 40, is a down-to-earth Scouser from a modest home in Liverpool. Gerry, also 40, is the youngest of five children raised in a south Glasgow tenement.

Their brains and talent won them lucrative careers, she as a GP and he as a hospital consultant cardiologist.

Their children were the result of considerable effort and emotional trauma for a couple who could not conceive naturally.

Kate and Gerry met as young doctors working in different departments of Glasgow’s Western Infirmary in the early 1990s.

The attraction was obvious, but any chance of a long-term future together looked doomed from the start when Kate’s wanderlust took her to a job on the other side of the world — in Wellington, New Zealand. Gerry had also landed a dream post — in America. But he is a man of steely resolve, as his relentless hunt for Madeleine would later prove. He wasn’t giving up on Kate. At the last minute, his heart ruled his head. He dropped everything and spent his savings flying Down Under to be with her.

It was quite a gamble. Gerry admits: “It was really only then that we started going out together.” And he joked: “I saw Kate on the other side of the river and I crossed it! She made sure that I followed her. I must have courted her for a long time.”

Kate reciprocated his devotion with hours spent on the touchlines as he captained amateur Kiwi soccer side Napier City Rovers. He had once been Scottish universities 800 metres champion and was a decent footballer tipped for a professional career before opting for medicine.

His team-mate and close friend Ian Gearey said: “He was such a down-to-earth, natural guy. Kate was a doctor in Wellington and Gerry was a surgeon here in Hawke’s Bay. Everyone said he was very talented and he was well regarded.

“But the work wasn’t the real reason for him coming to New Zealand. He told us he’d come for her, to woo her, really. He won her heart and they got together here.”

Kate was never in doubt about Gerry after he followed her more than 11,000 miles. By the time they returned to settle in Glasgow in 1998 they were already planning their wedding.

It took place that December, at Our Lady of the Annunciation in Catholic Kate’s home city of Liverpool.

Two years on, Gerry got a job as a registrar at Glenfield Hospital, Leicester, and the family moved south.

Kate, desperate for children, gave up on a high-flying career in anaesthetics and gynaecology and started as a part-time GP in Melton Mowbray.

Natural conception proved beyond them. Kate said: “The one thing I had always been definite about is that I wanted a family. I wanted to be a mother. Then, when we were trying for a baby and it wasn’t happening, it was really hard.

“The longer it went on, the harder it was. I saw my friends having children and I was delighted for them, but it made me sad too. We tried unsuccessfully for several years to conceive.

“There came a point when we admitted we needed help. I was so desperate to have a child I’d try anything. I know IVF isn’t everyone’s choice but I wanted to try it.”

An initial IVF cycle failed, but the couple remained united and strong. Kate finally fell pregnant with Madeleine in 2002. “It was just fantastic. It didn’t seem true,” she said.

“I did a test at home so I could handle the result if it wasn’t good. I was looking at it thinking, ‘I don’t believe that’. Then I went to the hospital and they checked it. I was really excited.

“It was a really uncomplicated pregnancy — I had no sickness, nothing.”

Madeleine was born on May 12, 2003. “There she was, perfect,” said Kate. “She was lovely. She had the most beautiful face. I’d thought I was going to have a boy, just based on instinct. That actually made it even more special that she was a girl. She took us by surprise.”

Gerry said: “It was incredibly special because we had been waiting for a long time.

“Others thought we were getting old and might end up not having our own children.

“She was close to the perfect child. I know all parents think that, but Madeleine really was.”

A friend, Alan Grieves, said: “After many years of hope, the birth of their beautiful Madeleine made their lives complete.

“We have never seen Kate and Gerry as happy as they were that day.”

Kate said: “The first five or six months were really difficult. Madeleine had very bad colic and cried about 18 hours a day.

“She had to be picked up all the time, so I spent many a day dancing round the living room holding her. Sometimes she looked so sad with colic and the three of us would cuddle together trying to get her through it.

“But you go through that difficult, bad stage and it tightens the bond. We’ve both got an incredible bond with Madeleine.”

The McCanns and their baby girl moved to Holland for a year while Gerry worked on new heart imaging techniques.

They came back briefly for Madeleine’s baptism, carried out by Father Paul Seddon, who had married the couple five years earlier.

“It was a big family occasion — a wonderfully happy day,” said Father Seddon. “Madeleine had a whale of a time and really loved being the centre of attention. She had not long been walking and I have some great memories of trying to keep up with her as she ran around the church.”

In 2004, still in Holland, Kate fell pregnant again through IVF and the family moved back to England, buying a substantial home in rural Rothley.

Their twins, Sean and Amelie, were born in February 2005 and left little Madeleine awestruck. “She was amazing,” Kate said. “She was only 20 months old — still a baby herself — but she handled it all so well.

“Madeleine came in to see them for the first time and, oh . . . her little face! It was lovely.”

Madeleine was as bright as a button, outgoing, loving towards her brother and sister and prone to tantrums, as toddlers are.

“She’s got bags of character, that’s for sure,” Kate said. “She’s very loving, caring, she’s very funny, very chatty, very engaging, but she has her moments, like all children do. I do think she’s pretty special.”

Gerry added: “She is very funny and often a little ringleader in nursery and with her friends. She was running around shouting, ‘Be a monster, be a monster’ and we would chase her.”

The couple wanted a big family and were planning to try for a fourth baby. Kate’s dad Brian Healy said: “Children are the most important thing in their lives. Having another was something they’d been thinking about.

“But that was before Madeleine went missing.”

A grainy family video shot on April 28, 2007, is heartbreaking to watch now. Madeleine, wearing a pink Barbie backpack and holding another little girl’s hand, clambers excitedly up the steps of the plane taking the McCanns on their fateful holiday to Portugal.

The angel-faced three-year-old slips and grazes her shin on the third step, but cries for only a few seconds. It would take more than that to dampen her enthusiasm about the prospect of a week in the sunshine.

Madeleine, Kate, Gerry and two-year-olds Sean and Amelie were part of a group of 17 flying from East Midlands Airport to the Algarve resort of Praia da Luz. They caught the bmibaby flight at 9.30am.

They landed at Faro and hopped aboard the airport shuttle bus.

The video footage continues. Madeleine, a tiny blonde figure still holding her Barbie bag and wearing pink shorts, a pink top and trainers, swings her legs cheerfully as she sits next to Sean. Kate ruffles Sean’s hair and holds Amelie’s arm.

For some reason Gerry looks sombre. “Cheer up Gerry,” a friend jokes, to much laughter. “We’re on holiday.”

Gerry said later: “Madeleine was dead excited about going away with the rest of the kids. It was her first time to Portugal. She had her Barbie rucksack with a pull-up handle. It’s a really girlie one. We all had to have our own rucksacks — even Sean and Amelie — it was quite funny.”

The McCanns’ group arrived at the upmarket Mark Warner Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz, on the coast 120 miles south of Lisbon. They intended to stay for a week, returning home on May 5. The four families, nine adults and eight children, had rented apartments in Waterside Gardens Block 5. The McCanns’ flat, 5a, was on the ground floor, on a street corner. The other families had two flats next door, 5b and 5d, and another on the floor above.

That first evening, Saturday, April 28, the group ate dinner at the Millennium Restaurant and Terrace, another Ocean Club property ten minutes away. For the rest of their stay they established a practice of giving the kids tea, playing with them for an hour and then putting them to bed in their apartments before going out to the nearby tapas bar for dinner.

The bar was within sight of the apartments and less than a minute’s walk away.

They took it in turns to make regular checks on the kids. Whatever doubts they should have had about this arrangement were quelled by the sense of security the resort gave them. They could barely imagine a safer place for the children.

But on the morning of May 3, the date the McCanns’ lives changed for ever, Madeleine gave her parents pause for thought.

At breakfast she told them she and the twins had been awake and upset in bed the night before, but no one came to help.

“Mummy,” she said, “Why didn’t you come when we were crying last night?” Kate said later: “Gerry and I spoke for a couple of minutes and agreed to keep a closer watch over the children” — which meant more frequent returns from the tapas bar to check on them.

“With hindsight Kate and Gerry think someone could have disturbed Madeleine that night,” their spokesman Clarence Mitchell said later. “But they felt she and the twins were safe and secure.

“They decided to be even more careful in the times they checked on the children.”

Madeleine spent a happy day at the resort’s children’s club, where she was left with Sean and Amelie while Gerry and Kate had a stroll. “She had a ball,” Kate said. “They did swimming, went on a little boat, went to a beach, did lots of colouring-in and face painting.”

The couple collected the children at 12.30pm for lunch at the apartment, then took them back to the kids’ club while they played tennis. Madeleine had tea with staff at 5.30pm and was picked up just before 6pm.

All three kids were put to bed at about 7pm. Madeleine was in her pink Marks and Spencer pyjamas featuring a picture of Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh.

Kate said: “Before she went to bed, Madeleine said, ‘Mummy, I’ve had the best day ever. I’m having lots of fun’. They had a little dance prepared for Friday. I don’t know what it was. I never got to see it.”

By 8pm Kate and Gerry were enjoying a bottle of white wine he had bought from the local supermarket. It was a Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc, a favourite from their days in New Zealand.

They were six days into their holiday and chatted about how it was all working so well — they were relaxed and the children were loving it.

Madeleine, Sean and Amelie were asleep in the front bedroom of the apartment, overlooking the small car park and the street beyond. Madeleine had a single bed nearest the door. The twins were next to her in two travel cots.

At about 8.30pm the McCanns, as they had done since their second night there, strolled to the tapas bar about 50 metres away.

“For us, it wasn’t very much different to having dinner in your garden, in the proximity of the location,” Gerry said later. “We’ve been assured by thousands of people who’ve either done exactly the same or say they would have done the same.”

But the sense of security the McCanns felt proved false.

From the tapas bar they could just see the rear of their apartment, where closed but unlocked patio doors led to the lounge and kitchen. They could not see the children’s bedroom, next to the locked front door.

The diners at the table, later nicknamed the “Tapas Nine”, were Gerry, Kate, Dr Russell O’Brien, then 36, (a consultant from Exeter and a friend of Gerry), his partner Jane Tanner, 37, Dr Matthew Oldfield, 37, wife Rachael, 36, David Payne, 41, a research fellow in cardiovascular sciences at Leicester University, wife Fiona, 34, and her mother Dianne Webster.

During a fun-filled evening they drank four bottles of wine between them.

The meal was punctuated almost constantly by one parent or another leaving the table to check on their children. They often crossed paths on their way to the apartments and back.

Gerry went back to 5a to check on Madeleine, Sean and Amelie at about 9.05pm. They were safely asleep. Gerry saw Madeleine snuggled up with her favourite toy, Cuddle Cat, bought by her godfather. The blanket was up near her head.

Something was slightly odd. Gerry was sure he’d shut the children’s bedroom door when he left for the tapas bar. Now it was open.

In hindsight he is convinced her abductor had opened it, then hurriedly hid inside the flat as he heard Gerry enter.

At the time, though, Gerry had no reason to worry — he assumed Madeleine had opened the door earlier to get a drink of water and gone back to bed. The window was closed and the shutter down. All was fine. Gerry closed the bedroom door again and left the apartment through the patio doors to rejoin his friends. Madeleine, it now seems, was snatched in the few seconds that followed.

The kidnapper had only one viable escape route — the bedroom window — since the front door was locked and Gerry had only just left via the patio doors.

On his way back to the bar, Gerry came across Jeremy Wilkins, another holidaymaker he had met at the resort’s tennis courts.

They chatted for a few minutes and were seen doing so at 9.15pm by Jane Tanner, a “Tapas Nine” friend. She was on her way back to her flat to check on boyfriend Russell O’Brien, who was nursing their sick child.

As she passed them she saw up ahead a man walking briskly across the top of the road, away from the apartments and towards the outer road of the complex. He was swarthy, about 5ft 7ins, between 35 and 40 and with dark, curly hair.

A little girl wrapped in a blanket hung limply from his arms.

All Tanner saw of her was her bare feet dangling down and pink and white pyjamas. Such a sighting was not unusual in a family holiday resort. “There is a crèche nearby,” she said later. “I thought he might be a father picking up his child.”

Unknown to her, Madeleine’s pyjamas were pink and white.

Tanner thought nothing further of it. Aside from anything else, she knew Gerry had just looked in on his kids and presumably found all was well. When she returned to the tapas bar around 9.25pm she understandably did not think it significant enough to mention.

The next check took place shortly after 9.30pm. O’Brien went back to look in on his child, accompanied by another friend, Matthew Oldfield, who had offered to save Kate the trouble by checking on her children as well as his.

Oldfield went into the McCanns’ apartment and found the children’s door open but had no reason to suspect anything — he was not to know Gerry had closed it half an hour earlier.

During his quick check he saw Sean and Amelie asleep but did not set eyes on Madeleine, whose bed was behind the door. However, the room was silent and he assumed everything was fine.

The men rejoined the table just before 10pm. Not long afterwards, Kate decided to make her own check. It took less than a minute to walk to the apartment and enter through the patio doors.

She knew something was wrong right away. The window was open, causing a draught which slammed their bedroom door.

A friend said later: “She knew the window had been closed. She then saw Madeleine was missing but it took a few seconds to register.

“She searched the flat three times and realised she was gone.” Cuddle Cat was abandoned in the bedroom. Kate was frantic. She searched the apartment but knew immediately Madeleine had been abducted. “I never thought for one second that she’d walked out,” she said. “I knew someone had been in the apartment because of the way it had been left. There wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in my mind she’d been taken.

“There was about 20 seconds of disbelief when I thought, ‘That can’t be right.’ I was checking for her. Then there was panic and fear. I was screaming her name.”

Her screams echoed round the complex. She ran from the apartment to the restaurant, crying: “Madeleine has gone. Someone has taken her.”

Gerry ran to 5a and rechecked everywhere Kate had looked, then dashed round the apartment block.

A friend was despatched to the resort’s 24-hour reception desk to phone the police.

The call was made at around 10.15pm — but the local police, ill-equipped for anything of this magnitude, began a catalogue of incompetence by taking almost an hour to arrive. The two officers who turned up at 11.10pm spoke no English and needed a translator.

Panic set in. Kate was already sure Madeleine had been taken by paedophiles and would be dead. Gerry tried his best to comfort her but his fears were identical.

At 11.40pm he rang his sister Trish in Scotland. He was almost incoherent — and Trish tried to calm him down. It is hard now to imagine this of a man who has remained so calm and measured in public ever since.

At midnight the Policia Judiciaria, the PJ, who investigate serious crimes, were called in, arriving at 1am. They, along with the McCanns, their friends, other holidaymakers and locals, scoured the area for two and a half hours.

At 3am Kate rang friends Jon and Michelle Corner, Sean and Amelie’s godparents, at their Merseyside home. Jon said: “She just blurted out that Maddie had been abducted. She said, ‘They’ve taken my little girl’.”

Child abductions are so rare in Portugal that there was a general feeling among the authorities that Madeleine would turn up asleep under a bush. Apathy and incredulity set the tone for the police investigation.

The PJ gave up the search for the night at around 3.30am.

Gerry went back out again at about 4am with his friend David Payne.

At 6am Gerry and Kate held hands as they walked around scrubland on the outskirts of the village calling Madeleine’s name.

The British embassy issued a statement declaring Madeleine missing. But there was no physical evidence she had been kidnapped. Gerry and Kate alone were convinced of that.

The backlash against the McCanns began immediately. Most parents wondered why an educated couple left three tiny children unattended to sleep in their holiday flat while they went out to dinner nearby. Many wondered if they would have done the same and most concluded they wouldn’t.

Most also concluded that the point wasn’t worth making publicly while Madeleine was still missing and her parents enduring a living hell. Accusations of neglect wouldn’t help her or them.

But in Portugal and the UK a vocal minority wasted no time. The speed and ferocity of the attacks was astonishing. BBC’s Radio Five Live held an ill-judged debate on the McCanns’ parenting standards only 24 hours after Madeleine was snatched. Only a few callers found that their sympathy outweighed the urge to attack the couple for “abandoning their daughter” to her kidnapper.

It was just the beginning. On May 6 a senior Portuguese cop said the McCanns might be charged for leaving the children alone, which he said was illegal there.

In Britain the NSPCC said babies and children should never be left alone even for a short time.

The chorus of disapproval grew, especially when the McCanns admitted they had left the children the same way several nights running. Some newspaper columnists could not resist kicking the good-looking middle-class doctors while they were down.

Not all parents disapproved, however — many sent messages of support to Kate and Gerry saying they would not have hesitated to do the same thing.

Some newspaper commentators, too, saw nothing wrong with it and pointed out that the chances of a kidnapper snatching a child from their bed were almost infinitesimally small.

It was a debate Kate and Gerry were by now having endlessly in their minds. “Every hour now, I still ask, ‘Why did I think that was safe?’ But it did feel safe and so right,” Kate said later. Her mum Susan Healy defended them: “They know this was a mistake. But it wasn’t child neglect, it wasn’t not caring for your children.

“Why would you think something like this would happen? You make a decision and think it’s OK. This time it wasn’t and Kate and Gerry have to live with that. That’s dreadful and they don’t need pressure from other people.

“Kate and Gerry went to a family-friendly resort where there has never been any crime or any trouble.

“They felt their children were safe, with the shutters down. They were also maybe lulled into a false sense of security by the fact they went on holiday with three other couples.

“They were quite happy about the checks they were doing on the children. You couldn’t have more caring parents.

“Kate and Gerry are absolutely devastated. I have heard my daughter wailing like a wild animal.”

The police hunt for Madeleine was a shambles from the outset. For several crucial days detectives failed even to take seriously the idea she had been abducted — a stance that infected every aspect of the probe.

Evidence was contaminated, Portugal’s borders left wide open and the investigation fatally compromised in virtually every conceivable way by a local force ill-equipped to handle it.

It was bad enough for the McCanns that their child was snatched. It was worse luck still for it to happen in a backwater policed by incompetents.

In Britain and America, such an abduction would have triggered an almost instant police dragnet — sniffer dogs and helicopters would have scoured the area while the child’s picture would have been handed to the Press and TV to make public as fast as possible.

None of this happened. The Portuguese police decided an almost total LACK of publicity was the best option, to keep suspects in the dark about the investigation’s progress. In the first and possibly most elementary blunder, police failed to seal off the crime scene — the McCanns’ apartment — until 10am the morning after Madeleine went missing. Before then family, friends and a wide variety of police officers and “helpers” traipsed through the property, rendering any DNA clues found there as good as useless.

A friend of the McCanns said: “On the night Madeleine was taken there were loads of people in and out. Once it was obvious she had not wandered off it should have been immediately sealed.

“Then there were police officers smoking and dropping ash and butt ends.”

Even one of the first officers to arrive admitted the area was “totally contaminated” within an hour because his bosses failed to secure it. The apartment was trampled “by the world and his dog”, the cop, speaking anonymously, told The Sun.

“By the time we got there it was chaos,” he said. “When we arrive and see our superiors on the scene we expect the situation to be under control. It was like they weren’t even there.

“Family, friends, neighbours, staff, people off the street — everyone was in and out of the bedroom to check under the bed. The damage had been done.”

His partner added: “Any disappearance should be treated as a potential crime. It’s not brain surgery.”

Portugal’s top forensic expert Jose Anes later said he doubted anyone would ever stand trial because the evidence was too contaminated for any safe prosecution.

One of the cops leading the search blamed the McCanns. Police chief Olegario Sousa said more than 20 people entered the apartment early on, touching furniture and opening and closing doors and windows.

He added: “The presence of so many people — especially in the room where the little girl slept with her brother and sister — could have at least complicated the work of the forensic team.

“At the very worst they would have destroyed all the evidence. This could prove to be fatal for the investigation.”

The McCanns hit back via a friend, who said: “Of course the family are going to search the apartment. If your child goes missing, you search under beds, in wardrobes, behind doors — everywhere.”

Yet another gaffe within hours of the abduction only emerged months later.

Police allowed Robert Murat, who later became their first suspect, to sit in as translator at the first witness interviews. They never checked his background or his alibi — they used him simply because he spoke Portuguese. Regardless of Murat’s innocence, the information he heard would have been like gold-dust for anyone constructing a cover story.

One of those quizzed was holidaymaker Bridget O’Donnell, an ex-BBC producer who worked on Crimewatch and was horrified by the amateurish investigation.

She was questioned the day after the kidnapping in her apartment near the McCanns’. Bridget said: “Murat was breathless, perhaps a little excited. He reminded me of a boy in my class at school who was bullied.

“Through Murat we answered a few questions and gave our details, which the policeman wrote down on the back of a bit of paper. No notebook.

“Then he pointed to the photocopied picture of Madeleine on the table. ‘Is this your daughter?’ he asked. ‘Er, no,’ we said. ‘That’s the girl you are meant to be searching for.’ My heart sank for the McCanns.”

Worse was to come. It emerged that police failed to send Madeleine’s bedding for forensic tests. By the time they revisited the apartment 24 hours after she was taken, cleaners had washed the sheets, blankets and pillowcase. Vital fibres from the abductor’s clothing, or even their fingerprints, may have been lost.

Only hair samples were sent for testing at a Portuguese forensic lab. An insider there said half the evidence needed to find out what happened was not tested.

He said: “It is obvious it would have been good if they had sent sheets, blankets, pillows and even the mattress. Some important clue could have been found.”

It took 48 hours for