More than 16 years after the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal, the country’s police have offered an apology to her parents for the way they handled the case and accusing them of staging her kidnapping.
A delegation of senior officers travelled from Lisbon to London earlier this year, the BBC reported, although Portuguese media said that Luis Neves, the national director of the national criminal investigation police agency of Portugal, denied that there was an apology. He acknowledged that there was contact between the investigators and the parents.
The McCann family has not commented on the apology and their daughter’s disappearance remains unsolved.
In September 2007, four months after Madeleine, 3, vanished, Kate and Gerry McCann were made suspects in the Portuguese investigation. Both were questioned by detectives, who believed they had staged an abduction and concealed Madeleine’s body. The McCanns have always denied any wrongdoing.
The McCanns — named arguidos, or formal suspects — were finally cleared in July 2008, when the Portuguese police investigation was shelved because of lack of evidence.
Advertisement
Portuguese police said their initial investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance was not handled properly, there was insufficient importance given at the time to missing children and that her parents’ position as foreigners in an environment they did not understand was not appreciated. They also said they had briefed the McCanns on their ongoing investigation.
In 2015, the couple won more than £350,000 in libel damages over allegations that they were involved in the disappearance of their daughter. Separately, they were also awarded £550,000 in damages for false allegations against them published by Express Newspapers in the UK.
Gonçalo Amaral, a Portuguese detective, claimed in his book and a documentary that they had covered up Madeleine’s death after she went missing in Praia da Luz, a holiday resort in the Algarve.
A Lisbon court ruled that Amaral should pay the McCanns €250,000 (£179,000) each in damages, and has banned further sales of his book, The Truth of the Lie.
Amaral, who led the initial investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance, released his book three days after the case was closed in July 2008. He later took part in a documentary for Portuguese television in which he claimed that Madeleine was dead, that there had been no abduction and that the McCanns had hidden her body.
Advertisement
Gerry and Kate McCann, a cardiologist and former GP, won a ruling in Lisbon in 2010 to ban sales of the book, which was overturned later the same year. They also launched a libel action against Amaral, who was sacked from the investigation after months of blunders — claiming that they and their family had suffered emotional and psychological harm as a result of his claims.
Giving evidence at the Palace of Justice in Lisbon in 2014, the couple spoke of their “devastation, desperation, anxiety and pain” over the allegations. They also maintained that the book and documentary had reduced support from the Portuguese people as they searched for their daughter. They accused Amaral of defamation, of breaching their human rights and of being a “self-obsessed, manipulative money-grabber”.
The McCann’s libel case against the former detective over the claims he made about them in his book was thrown out by the Portuguese supreme court. The couple appealed to the European Court of Human Rights but lost that challenge in September 2022.
Efforts to prosecute Christian Brueckner, a convicted rapist suspected of abducting and killing Madeleine, for five other offences restarted last month after a ruling in a German court.
The case against Brueckner was thrown into doubt after a court in Braunschweig ruled in April that it had no responsibility for hearing the new trial because Brueckner’s last place of residence was a dilapidated farm in another part of Germany rather than in Braunschweig, where he had lived previously.
Advertisement
That would have left it up to a court in the state of Saxony-Anhalt to prosecute Brueckner, leading to speculation over the impact of any delay on a possible future trial over Madeleine’s disappearance.
But a higher regional court ruled that the Braunschweig court did have jurisdiction, following an appeal by the Braunschweig state prosecutor’s office, which has been investigating Brueckner over the alleged abduction of Madeleine and for other violent offences.
As a result, Brueckner, 46, who is serving a seven-year sentence for rape, can be prosecuted on five other charges, all of which he denied — including the alleged rape of a 14-year-old German girl and allegedly molesting an 11-year-old girl at a folk festival.
Brueckner has always denied any involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance. The Braunschweig prosecutor’s office has yet to gather enough evidence to file charges against Brueckner over Madeleine’s disappearance.
