Should this man receive a European award for his services to Child welfare?

This is from a poster on the Sky website.

TODAY IN BRUSSELS:

A business man discovered he was going to be at the European Parliament while the conference was going on.

He got his secretary to print out a hundred leaflets, then he stood outside the conference room and handed them out. He got a very positive response and is meeting with some journalists later (at their request.)

This is what the leaflet says:

On 3rd May 2007, Madeleine McCann disappeared from her parents’ holiday apartment at Praia da Luz in Portugal.

Her parents, Gerry and Kate McCann, had left her and her two younger siblings in an unlocked apartment that evening, as they had done every evening of their holiday, in order to enjoy an alcohol-fuelled dinner at the resort Tapas bar, well over a hundred metres away. From the bar, they were unable to have a clear line of sight to the apartment where Madeleine was. They left them unattended, despite their Mark Warner holiday resort offering babysitting services and evening supervision of children.

They claim to have checked on them every half an hour. Yet the statements of the parents and their companions to the police about their movements that night are full of contradictions and obfuscations.

The very instant that Kate McCann discovered that Madeleine was missing, she and her husband Gerry insisted that she had been abducted.

Yet there is little evidence that Madeleine was abducted from the apartment.

Since May 2007, there has been an ongoing investigation by the Policia Judiciária, the Portuguese police (PJ), into Madeleine’s disappearance. The investigation is currently headed personally by Paulo Rebelo, the respected national deputy director of the PJ.

According to information in the Portuguese press, Paulo Rebelo and his team have concluded that the evidence for an abduction is minimal, and that in all probability Madeleine died in the holiday apartment. Their conclusions are based on forensic and other evidence, including evidence collected through the use of UK police sniffer dogs trained in the discovery of cadaver odour. The dogs used by the Portuguese and British police are the same ones which discovered concealed remains in the recent Jersey children’s home case.

On the basis of police evidence and investigations, the parents of Madeleine were constituted suspects (or “arguidos”) by the Portuguese police in September 2007, and then immediately left Portugal for the UK, following police interviews in which they refused to answer key questions put to them by the Portuguese police. They have not returned to Portugal since then.

This week (April 7th-11th 2008), a top-level team of the Policia Judiciara, led by Paulo Rebelo himself, are in the United Kingdom, conducting interviews together with the police of Leicestershire. They are interviewing the companions of the McCanns on the fateful evening, the so-called Tapas 7, because of inconsistencies in their original statements to the police last spring. The Portuguese police suspect that the Tapas 7 are being untruthful in their evidence, and that they have knowledge of what happened to Madeleine that fateful night.

The McCanns personally, and through their media spokesman Clarence Mitchell, have worked hard to discredit the Portuguese police, calling into question their competencies and motives, and insisting that Madeleine remains alive and that the police should be searching for her. The Policia Judiciária are not actively searching for her because they have concluded internally that she has in all probability been dead since May 3rd 2007.

The McCanns have set up a special fund, based on the thesis that Madeleine is alive and needs to be searched for, and which to date has collected over a million pounds (1.5 mln Euro) in donations from the public and libel fees obtained from the Express Newspaper Group. Among the mission statements of the Fund is the aim “to provide support, including financial assistance, to Madeleine’s family.”

Over the last year, the McCann parents have increasingly aligned themselves with lobbying for the Amber Alert system, in place in the US, to be introduced on a Europe-wide basis. They are positioning themselves as global ambassadors for missing children.

As they continue their campaign, many questions need to be asked. They include:

• Why have the McCanns not taken full responsibility for the disappearance of their daughter? Surely what they should be doing is campaigning on the theme of “Do not leave your children unattended in unlocked apartments, whilst you enjoy alcohol-fuelled dinners at a distance where you cannot observe them, as we did”.

• Why have they undertaken a campaign to discredit the Portuguese police, and invested hundreds of thousands of pounds into funding private investigators of dubious reputation (Metodo 3), to maintain the public belief that their daughter is alive? Should they not instead be co-operating in answering the questions of the PJ?

• Why have the McCanns hired, at great expense, top lawyers in the UK and US on matters of extradition, libel and criminal evidence? These include Kingsley Napley, whose Michael Caplan QC fought efforts to extradite General Pinochet from the UK; Carter-Ruck, the UK's most expensive libel lawyers; and Hurley, Burish & Stanton in Madison, Wisconsin, USA, specialising in debunking sniffer dog evidence in criminal trials. Are these the typical actions of parents of missing children?

• Why are the supporters of the Amber Alert system aligning themselves with Kate and Gerry McCann, who remain official suspects (“arguidos”) in an ongoing police investigation, jointly conducted by Portuguese and British police forces? Are these the right role models for ambassadors in the cause of missing children?

There are many more unanswered questions about the disappearance of Madeleine and the activities of her parents since May 2007. The McCanns and their spokesman Clarence Mitchell are working hard to suppress these questions and the debate around them, including having successfully closed down the The Mirror Group internet discussion forum, and forced (via libel proceedings) the Express Group to remove from its internet sites every article that they had published about the McCanns and the Madeleine case since May 2007. The only crime of the internet fora and the Express Group was to republish and comment on stories appearing in the Portuguese media.

Thankfully, it is still possible to debate the McCann case freely and ask the questions that the McCanns, their spokesman, and their expensive lawyers have sought to suppress.

Do we know who he is ?

He speaks as a person who is appalled at the mccanns and their pr machines .

He speaks out in dismay at how the dynamic duo can be speaking on behalf of missing children .

He is the voice of reason and i for one think he should be commended

i dont know if he deserves any awards - but the arguement he makes is compelling

i have always maintained that we should show respect to the portugeuse authorities - they must have reasons for their actions, and hiring expensive legal and PR people does not seem to me to be the actions of distraught parents

all organisations should not ally themselves with this pair until their status is clarified ...

EDIT, lets see how long before he gets sued by above expensive legal team, honestly people - is this how publicly donated money to search for a little girl should be spent ???

Wow Jack is this really true??? If so I would love to shake the mans hand! How refreshing that some one has been brave enough to speak out against these people and their sinister forces! I hope he gets all the publicity in the world because when you read it. it is more frightening to think they are getting away with it!

Well done! Can only give one star!

absolutely, full marks

Yes he should, because he has said what no other Journalist dare say because of the fear of being sued, all he wants is some answers because of a little girl that is missing, and he cares about her. well done polandguy.

YES!

Definitely not! That is just slander!

No.

Does he have access to all police files in this investigation. is he head of some Portuguese/British police department. I'm sure i could write a leaflet with all that is wrong if i based my info on media coverage. The investigation is best left to the professionals and smear campaigns left until there is some solid proof either way as to what happened to Maddie. I'm sure her parents regret their actions, and what a price to pay eh?

EDIT in the event she was abducted. there isn't only one victim, it affects an entire family. how naive are you. you can't go around in life judging every situation and judging people. humans make errors. by naivety of bad choices, that's the way it has been and always will be. lets just say you cross a road with your child and they pull free from you and get hit by a car. whose to blame. you, the child, the driver????

in today's society we are all to blame for Maddie going missing. WE allow sickos, murderers and paedophiles to wander free. nothing s ever done about them. why don't you do something productive to protect kids, you appear to be very concerned, so do something of value instead of posting your comments on here.

you bet ye.

No.