http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/may/2 ... heobserver
False tip-offs hamper hunt for Madeleine
Huge rewards offered for finding the missing girl bring problems for police as the family's website appeals for information and gets 75 million hits
Ned Temko in Praia da Luz
The Observer, Sunday 20 May 2007
It was past nightfall on Friday when a Portuguese police frogman finally secured his line to a half-crumbling ring of stones and lowered himself into a well two miles from the holiday flat where four-year-old Madeleine McCann disappeared 16 days ago.
For 12 hours, a team of senior detectives, helping to mount the largest manhunt in Portugal's history, had been putting in place preparations for the search. Initially, they had intended to move in during daylight hours, hoping that the overgrown field and an abandoned house nearby would prove sufficiently remote from the popular Algarve resort of Praia da Luz to escape attention. But the arrival of an advance police dog unit had been noticed by two local reporters.
Just maybe, the officers figured, the latest tip-off might be genuine. The last thing they wanted, one of them confided, was 'an army of paparazzi' if they discovered the body of the missing four-year-old.
They didn't. 'We found nothing,' said one of the detectives. He spoke with a mixture of relief - at the continuing promise of finding Madeleine alive - and frustration at the lack of any breakthrough, more than two weeks after her presumed abduction, in finding her or the people who took her.
'We continue to believe that Madeleine is in Portugal, and alive,' he told The Observer last night. 'I can give you nothing certain to confirm that, but we are continuing to follow up several leads. Based on the investigative work that we've done so far, that remains our conviction.'
But there were growing signs last night that the Portuguese police fear that their hunt for Madeleine risked getting submerged in false leads generated by the millions of pounds in reward money now on offer and the spiralling worldwide information campaign.
The search team has received thousands of tip-offs passed on by forces in Europe, North Africa and the US since Madeleine went missing from the holiday flat as Kate and Gerry ate dinner at a tapas restaurant some 50 metres away.
In addition, police are getting several dozen potentially reliable reports of alleged sightings each day - the most recent including an account from a Swiss tourist in Crete and a Swedish visitor to the Moroccan city of Marrakech, both claiming they were certain they'd seen Madeleine.
The Swedish woman, Marie Olli, said she had seen a 'sad'-looking Madeleine in the company of a man in his late 30s asking: 'Can I see mummy soon?' (Husband lived in Leceister !!!!)
Yet so far at least, the leads have led nowhere.
'We've received innumerable phone calls from people who say they've seen the little girl climbing into a car,' a police spokesman was quoted yesterday by a Portuguese newspaper.
He added that at least some of the informants were clearly being lured by the £2.5 million in reward money. 'That has provoked a lot of ambition,' he said. 'There are always people who are out to get easy money.'
The week began with the first visible signs of progress in the investigation, prompting feverish speculation in the Portuguese media that the police might soon be in a position to make arrests.
The talk of a possible breakthrough started on Monday, after officers suddenly swooped on a private villa just down the road from the block of flats where Madeleine was last seen and took away a 33-year-old Briton, Robert Murat, for questioning.
Equipment including a computer was also taken.
Murat, who grew up in Praia da Luz and is bilingual, had first drawn the attention of the army of foreign TV and newspaper reporters in town by volunteering that he was helping out police as a translator during their interrogations.
At one point, he is said to have joked that with all this police work he might even be named as a 'suspect'.
Within 24 hours, he was. Murat became the first of the dozen people so far questioned by police to be declared an 'arguido', or formal suspect, under Portuguese law.
Police cordoned off the villa, where Murat lives with his 71-year-old mother Jenny, and conducted further searches.
As lurid local media reports spoke of pornographic or even paedophile material being taken away from the house - claims categorically denied by Murat's family and friends - a former Portuguese police investigator suggested on state television that search dogs had found Madeleine's 'scent' on the grounds of the Murats' home.
By Wednesday, the investigation appeared to be progressing further when police moved in on an apartment block on the other side of the holiday village and took away one of Murat's friends, a 22-year-old Russian-born computer expert named Sergei Malinka, for questioning.
The following day's local press was rife with reports that he, too, might have links to Madeleine's disappearance, focusing on an alleged phone call with Murat just hours after she went missing in the late evening of 3 May.
Further stoking speculation that police were moving towards cracking the case, it was also reported that Murat last week went to a local rental office and 'suspiciously' hired a car despite the fact that both he and his mother own cars.
And on Thursday, Jenny Murat was also questioned by police, with investigators reportedly wanting to press her on her repeated insistence to reporters that both she and her son had spent the entire evening of Madeleine's disappearance at their home: Robert's only 'alibi', local papers feverishly suggested.
Yet by last night, the police were saying there was still not sufficient evidence to charge Murat - much less Malinka, who has so far been interviewed only as a witness - with involvement in Madeleine McCann's abduction.
Murat has continued to declare he is a scapegoat and denies any involvement.
And members of the area's closely knit British expatriate community are insistent that both he and his mother, who in the days after Madeleine's disappearance set up a stand in to solicit information to help find her, are paying the price for 'simply trying to help'.
A senior detective speaking to The Observer categorically denied the Portuguese TV report that a police dog search had linked the Murat home to the missing Madeleine.
And the official police spokesman, Olegaria Sousa, was quoted in the respected weekly Expresso yesterday as saying: 'An investigation is not a police novel with the author of the crime is always discovered at the end.'
His comments came amid renewed questions about the conduct of the investigation, with the latest criticism prompted by the private firm that operates roadside cameras on the A22, main highway east towards Spain.
According to the company, Euroscut, police failed to check the cameras, which record the colour and make of passing cars, and had retrieved recordings for only a one-hour period for the day after Madeleine's disappearance.
In a completely unrelated incident yesterday, Portuguese police recovered an 11-year-old girl they believed had been kidnapped in the Spanish city of Malaga.
The police arrested the driver of a car with the girl, believed to be Eastern European, inside after a high-speed chase near the Spanish border.
Madeleine's parents, meanwhile, remain convinced that the best hope of finding their daughter rests with doing everything possible to keep her in the public eye.
Insistent that they will not leave Portugal without her, they have been trying to keep a semblance of normality for their other children, two-year-old twins Sean and Amelie.
At least twice a day, they can be seen in the increasingly hot early Algarve summer dropping off the twins at the resort kids' club just behind the flat where Madeleine disappeared.
Operating out of a separate flat in the holiday block, 'Team McCann', an assembly of friends and relatives dedicated to keeping Madeleine's story in the public eye, has begun work on a series of worldwide appeals, as well as reading and answering thousands of letters and emails.
Their most ambitious initiative last week was the launch of a website, which has received more than 75 million hits and over 30,000 messages in the past few days. Calum MacRae, a family friend and director of the firm running the Missing Madeleine site said. 'We've had to take the message facility down because our server was struggling to cope.'
The one setback has been an internet assault by opportunists who have registered more than 20 money-making websites - advertising everything from mobile phone ringtones to health insurance - with similar spellings to the official campaign site. Visitors who make a small typing error can find themselves redirected to advertising or pornography, an internet practice known as 'typosquatting'.
One of Kate's relatives, Michael Wright, provided an insight into the feelings driving the family's determination not to allow Madeleine's case to slip from public view.
After thanking the British and Portuguese press for their coverage he told reporters on Thursday afternoon:
'Kate and Gerry are the leaders of the whole campaign. Their ability to remain positive and focus on what we can do rather than go to the dark places - that they perhaps visited in the early days - is where our focus is, and it drives us all on.'
False tip-offs hamper hunt for Madeleine
Huge rewards offered for finding the missing girl bring problems for police as the family's website appeals for information and gets 75 million hits
Ned Temko in Praia da Luz
The Observer, Sunday 20 May 2007
It was past nightfall on Friday when a Portuguese police frogman finally secured his line to a half-crumbling ring of stones and lowered himself into a well two miles from the holiday flat where four-year-old Madeleine McCann disappeared 16 days ago.
For 12 hours, a team of senior detectives, helping to mount the largest manhunt in Portugal's history, had been putting in place preparations for the search. Initially, they had intended to move in during daylight hours, hoping that the overgrown field and an abandoned house nearby would prove sufficiently remote from the popular Algarve resort of Praia da Luz to escape attention. But the arrival of an advance police dog unit had been noticed by two local reporters.
Just maybe, the officers figured, the latest tip-off might be genuine. The last thing they wanted, one of them confided, was 'an army of paparazzi' if they discovered the body of the missing four-year-old.
They didn't. 'We found nothing,' said one of the detectives. He spoke with a mixture of relief - at the continuing promise of finding Madeleine alive - and frustration at the lack of any breakthrough, more than two weeks after her presumed abduction, in finding her or the people who took her.
'We continue to believe that Madeleine is in Portugal, and alive,' he told The Observer last night. 'I can give you nothing certain to confirm that, but we are continuing to follow up several leads. Based on the investigative work that we've done so far, that remains our conviction.'
But there were growing signs last night that the Portuguese police fear that their hunt for Madeleine risked getting submerged in false leads generated by the millions of pounds in reward money now on offer and the spiralling worldwide information campaign.
The search team has received thousands of tip-offs passed on by forces in Europe, North Africa and the US since Madeleine went missing from the holiday flat as Kate and Gerry ate dinner at a tapas restaurant some 50 metres away.
In addition, police are getting several dozen potentially reliable reports of alleged sightings each day - the most recent including an account from a Swiss tourist in Crete and a Swedish visitor to the Moroccan city of Marrakech, both claiming they were certain they'd seen Madeleine.
The Swedish woman, Marie Olli, said she had seen a 'sad'-looking Madeleine in the company of a man in his late 30s asking: 'Can I see mummy soon?' (Husband lived in Leceister !!!!)
Yet so far at least, the leads have led nowhere.
'We've received innumerable phone calls from people who say they've seen the little girl climbing into a car,' a police spokesman was quoted yesterday by a Portuguese newspaper.
He added that at least some of the informants were clearly being lured by the £2.5 million in reward money. 'That has provoked a lot of ambition,' he said. 'There are always people who are out to get easy money.'
The week began with the first visible signs of progress in the investigation, prompting feverish speculation in the Portuguese media that the police might soon be in a position to make arrests.
The talk of a possible breakthrough started on Monday, after officers suddenly swooped on a private villa just down the road from the block of flats where Madeleine was last seen and took away a 33-year-old Briton, Robert Murat, for questioning.
Equipment including a computer was also taken.
Murat, who grew up in Praia da Luz and is bilingual, had first drawn the attention of the army of foreign TV and newspaper reporters in town by volunteering that he was helping out police as a translator during their interrogations.
At one point, he is said to have joked that with all this police work he might even be named as a 'suspect'.
Within 24 hours, he was. Murat became the first of the dozen people so far questioned by police to be declared an 'arguido', or formal suspect, under Portuguese law.
Police cordoned off the villa, where Murat lives with his 71-year-old mother Jenny, and conducted further searches.
As lurid local media reports spoke of pornographic or even paedophile material being taken away from the house - claims categorically denied by Murat's family and friends - a former Portuguese police investigator suggested on state television that search dogs had found Madeleine's 'scent' on the grounds of the Murats' home.
By Wednesday, the investigation appeared to be progressing further when police moved in on an apartment block on the other side of the holiday village and took away one of Murat's friends, a 22-year-old Russian-born computer expert named Sergei Malinka, for questioning.
The following day's local press was rife with reports that he, too, might have links to Madeleine's disappearance, focusing on an alleged phone call with Murat just hours after she went missing in the late evening of 3 May.
Further stoking speculation that police were moving towards cracking the case, it was also reported that Murat last week went to a local rental office and 'suspiciously' hired a car despite the fact that both he and his mother own cars.
And on Thursday, Jenny Murat was also questioned by police, with investigators reportedly wanting to press her on her repeated insistence to reporters that both she and her son had spent the entire evening of Madeleine's disappearance at their home: Robert's only 'alibi', local papers feverishly suggested.
Yet by last night, the police were saying there was still not sufficient evidence to charge Murat - much less Malinka, who has so far been interviewed only as a witness - with involvement in Madeleine McCann's abduction.
Murat has continued to declare he is a scapegoat and denies any involvement.
And members of the area's closely knit British expatriate community are insistent that both he and his mother, who in the days after Madeleine's disappearance set up a stand in to solicit information to help find her, are paying the price for 'simply trying to help'.
A senior detective speaking to The Observer categorically denied the Portuguese TV report that a police dog search had linked the Murat home to the missing Madeleine.
And the official police spokesman, Olegaria Sousa, was quoted in the respected weekly Expresso yesterday as saying: 'An investigation is not a police novel with the author of the crime is always discovered at the end.'
His comments came amid renewed questions about the conduct of the investigation, with the latest criticism prompted by the private firm that operates roadside cameras on the A22, main highway east towards Spain.
According to the company, Euroscut, police failed to check the cameras, which record the colour and make of passing cars, and had retrieved recordings for only a one-hour period for the day after Madeleine's disappearance.
In a completely unrelated incident yesterday, Portuguese police recovered an 11-year-old girl they believed had been kidnapped in the Spanish city of Malaga.
The police arrested the driver of a car with the girl, believed to be Eastern European, inside after a high-speed chase near the Spanish border.
Madeleine's parents, meanwhile, remain convinced that the best hope of finding their daughter rests with doing everything possible to keep her in the public eye.
Insistent that they will not leave Portugal without her, they have been trying to keep a semblance of normality for their other children, two-year-old twins Sean and Amelie.
At least twice a day, they can be seen in the increasingly hot early Algarve summer dropping off the twins at the resort kids' club just behind the flat where Madeleine disappeared.
Operating out of a separate flat in the holiday block, 'Team McCann', an assembly of friends and relatives dedicated to keeping Madeleine's story in the public eye, has begun work on a series of worldwide appeals, as well as reading and answering thousands of letters and emails.
Their most ambitious initiative last week was the launch of a website, which has received more than 75 million hits and over 30,000 messages in the past few days. Calum MacRae, a family friend and director of the firm running the Missing Madeleine site said. 'We've had to take the message facility down because our server was struggling to cope.'
The one setback has been an internet assault by opportunists who have registered more than 20 money-making websites - advertising everything from mobile phone ringtones to health insurance - with similar spellings to the official campaign site. Visitors who make a small typing error can find themselves redirected to advertising or pornography, an internet practice known as 'typosquatting'.
One of Kate's relatives, Michael Wright, provided an insight into the feelings driving the family's determination not to allow Madeleine's case to slip from public view.
After thanking the British and Portuguese press for their coverage he told reporters on Thursday afternoon:
'Kate and Gerry are the leaders of the whole campaign. Their ability to remain positive and focus on what we can do rather than go to the dark places - that they perhaps visited in the early days - is where our focus is, and it drives us all on.'
