Nine years since three-year-old Madeleine McCann went missing from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, a UK tabloid has revealed that Metropolitan Police have completed their final forensic work, and it did not take them forwards.
“There are no plans for any further forensic work to take place,” reported the Mirror newspaper over the weekend – bizarrely weeks after the Resident heard from a reputable source in UK that an arrest was “imminent”.
The source working with tabloids like the Mirror and Sun claimed that Grange was “desperate” and “has decided that a botched burglary is what happened” even though there has not been one scrap of forensic evidence to back this.
Bearing in mind the description ‘botched’, critics’ contention has always been that the perpetrators of this burglary would have left some kind of trace evidence in their wake.
But since the last contact to this office by our UK source, there has been absolutely no word about the case – not even any stories about potential Madeleine sightings around the world, which usually come during the summer season.
Now, the Mirror’s story – picked up by other tabloids in the UK – suggests once again that the £12 million police probe launched in 2011 will be “scrapped” in the autumn, due to the fact that it has cost so much and resulted in so little.
The announcement is described as a “new blow” to Madeleine’s parents Kate and Gerry who lost the latest round in their long-running court battle with former Portuguese detective Gonçalo Amaral in April and are understood to be pursuing the issue still in the Supreme Court.
Amaral meantime has been busily writing a second book on the mystery (click here), and has told us that he is quietly confident that the civil battle will get to a point where the liens on his assets and property are finally removed.
Through his court battle with the McCanns, Amaral has maintained that the intention behind it was to asphyxiate him both financially and as a human being.
Indeed, without the help of a number of public appeals, the former PJ coordinator would not have been able to afford the legal help he has had so far.
natasha.donn@algarveresident.com
