El Patio: Do you think Madeleine’s parents are guilty?

Part 1.....


Cristina López Schlichting - C
Carmen Candela – CC
Pilar Cambra - PC
Gonçalo Amaral - GA

Cristina López Schlichting: It was a tricky affair because the McCanns - Maddie's parents, as you know, launched an international fund raising appeal, have appeared in all the media, they put obstacles in the path of journalists and finally, they insulted the Portuguese police. The person in charge of the Maddie case, former inspector of the Portuguese PJ, was removed from his job and is now retired, precisely because of this case, an individual who had a brilliant police record behind him and who had solved all the previous cases that ended up in his hands.

Now he has revealed all that he knows in a fascinating book, 200 thousand copies sold in Portugal, " Maddie: The Truth of the Lie” (Esquilo ed.).

C: Gonçalo Amaral, good afternoon

Gonçalo Amaral : Thank you very much

C: Thank you very much for being here with us today.

GA: Its my pleasure.

C: Well, in effect you tackle the principal aspects of the Maddie case and have a very bold thesis: do you agree?

GA: Well, I do not have a thesis, the thesis is that of a team of investigators, composed of Portuguese and English police officers, who in September of last year prepared a report that is included in the investigation files, which says that the girl died on May 3rd in the apartment, that the body was concealed and that a crime scenario was simulated, that of abduction.

C: That’s clear. The commissioner says the little girl died on the same day she disappeared, on May 3, 2007, the body was concealed and abduction was simulated. Pilar Cambre has a question concerning this.

Pilar Cambra: I have a question, because you state that the parents gave the girl a sedative, Calpol, because she had problems sleeping …

GA: Yes.

PC: … of insomnia, and that this medication probably led to her death, and that from that point … or that it is possible that the girl, upon getting up from her bed under the effects of this medicine, could have sustained a heavy fall, which caused her death. You deduce as proof, that her siblings who were sleeping in the same room, even when the room was full people, did not wake up when the investigation began. My question is: how is it possible to state that the girl, Maddie, Madeleine, died as a consequence of consuming a sleeping draught and that she died from a blow, if the body has not been found?

GA: It is in the book and is in the indictment, which points to death by accident, it was accidental. Death because cadaver odour and human blood were found behind a sofa, that is why it is considered that an accident could have happened.

C: In other words, there was blood and cadaver odour.

GA: Exactly. This is what we had in October of last year when I left the investigation. Also, in addition to this, it was considered that the girl had a problem with falling asleep and with sleeping and whether the parents, like other parents in England were giving her Calpol to sleep. It is said that there is a Calpol generation in England, because the mother says that it is a medicine, paracetamol and there are experts who say that it is an antihistamine with sedative effects.

Part 2.....

It is true that we did not find the body, but it is certain that those children were sleeping, it is true that they did not wake up during all that noise and it is also certain that the mother, according to a witness, Fiona Payne, held her hand under the twins’ noses to see if they were breathing - what was going on there? She could have been worried about the fact that the children were still asleep.

C: Surely she was checking to see if the other two children were all-right?

GA: We do not state that it is due to the Calpol, because the body has not been found, but it is a hypothesis, a thesis that has to be worked on. What cannot happen in a criminal investigation, is that course of the investigation is cut off when we think about death, if there is the thought of death, it is not possible to continue to think about abduction, this is not possible. If we had continued with the investigation, we and other persons who came to this conclusion, surely would have been able to arrive at a point of inflection, and have looked at the thesis that the parents could have had some responsibility in this and concluded it was impossible, because now we have found this or that, but we needed to investigate the death.

C: Concerning the Calpol perhaps Dr Candela can tell us more.

Carmen Candela: Well, I think … really what struck me most, as I was saying to you earlier, is the lack of breaking down, in the statements, when the father and the mother had to give statements, this struck me … this is perhaps part of the structure of a certain personality, which will not give way to anything, or, in other words, the lack of breaking down by a mother with all the drama that these parents have had to experience …

C: The coldness...

CC: The coldness, or rather, the emotional detachment from what was happening to her as regards her daughter, that has made an impression on me, from the maternal point of view, or, in other words I think as a mother. It is true that I am a mother of six children, I am a doctor and I have given my children sleeping draughts, and I being a doctor and knowing how to administer sleeping medicine, the anxiety that Pilar was mentioning, of placing your hand to see whether the child was breathing or not, always stays with you. I remember when my children were babies, and they would sleep for two hours longer before waking up for their bottle and you would get full of anguish. In other words this hypothesis, for me, is very credible, very credible. Above all, what has had impact on me is that in a determined moment, because of all the evidence I have read about, what has had most impact on me, was the search of the car by the sniffer dogs... …

Part 3......

PC: on the clothes, on the cuddly toy …

CC: there were accurate tests, or rather, they exist and everything else are hypotheses without any proof. And what really annoys me is that with all the means that exist, at the level of the police, which I do not know about, is that he has been taken off the investigation, really that just seems surreal to me.

I do not know if there is a real greater power, interests, I get lost in this world, but really the accounts of the officer make sense to me.

C: What explains that they should have removed the officer from this investigation? What is the power?

GA: In the book I say that in this case there has been more politics than police …

C: More politics than police …

CC: … it is the only thing that makes sense.

GA: As police officers, we must always work in an objective manner, we base ourselves upon the facts and try to understandthe facts and what could have happened. We do not worry what is politically correct, in this case there have been many political pressures, there has been an implication on the part of the British government, I do not know if this is the same in other cases in England, a Prime Minister is concerned about some parents who have lost a daughter and I do not know if he does this for all children and all parents who lose children, it is a domestic problem in England. I do not know why with …

PC: … why they got so involved …

GA: … why a spokesman of the British government, leaves his position to become the spokesman of a couple}, why does he not work as spokesman for another couple, why an Ambassador in Lisbon does not remain in Lisbon and speaks to the National Director of the Police. Why does he have to speak 24 hours later with the police officers who are working on the case? Why does he have to speak with us later? Why do we have to come out later with a press release saying that there has been an abduction, when we did not even know if there was an abduction? All this is very complicated.

C: Or, you practically …

GA: … this questions the objectivity.

Part 4.........

C: Practically you were forced to say that there had been an abduction, without your having any certainty …

GA: Yes, we had to form a strategy, well, we are going to prove that there was no abduction and next we will think about death. When the death thesis began to be discussed, well, then the parents said … we’re leaving. They decided to leave on the day that the dogs, the English dogs who are only used as a means to locate cadavour odour (were brought in).

CC: and another (for detecting) blood …

GA: … and another for blood and they left on the first day …

CC: I get lost when it comes to Madeleine's mother. I imagine, as a mother, that if a child of mine disappears and that the police accuse me, that this is the most serious, it will destroy me and will annoy me, but I would say, all right I am the guilty one, let’s see it through until the end, what i would not do is to would be to leave the story incomplete …

PC: No Carmen, but look, I wanted to ask the ex-commissioner, for me he is the commissioner, because I believe that it is something that is not lost, the investigator's character, which, Carmen was commenting about before saying that they have never broken down …

C: The McCanns.

PC: The McCanns. I noticed, when they were declared suspects or charged …

GA: Yes …

PC: … their entrance into the police station, I did notice from the news images, a certain collapse, or, rather an insecurity, in the sense that up to this moment they had been the stars of this terrible drama, and in this moment even if just by the way they walked, by the way they hid, yes I did perceive that to be a definite change of attitude, do you agreet?

GA: Yes, this began on a day when a colleague of mine went to the Mccanns’house where they were living in PDL and notified them of the date when they had to go to the police to be constituted arguidos, to be questioned. The mother said, and it is written in the indictment, what she said was this: “what will the press say? what are my parents going to say”? Well, this is not a normal reaction.

But we do not work with reactions of this type …

C: I have not understood this: have you understood, Pilar?

PC: what was she going to say to the press and what she was going to tell her parents?

GA: … what the press was going to say and what her parents would say.

CC: Ah yes,

Part 5..........

GA:... That is what the mother said when the police notified her of the day they would have to go to the police station to be constituted arguidos and to be questioned: what will the press say and what are my parents going to say?

PC: what are they going to say?

C: … the press and my parents.

GA: We do not work with this type of attitudes, we work with facts. There is a very important issue in this, we investigated the abduction thesis and all the other theses, and when we came to the hypothesis of investigating the death, the parents said that they were leaving …

CC: that they were going away …

GA: At that moment they removed themselves from the case, because a criminal case, everybody knows it, all the police officers know it, we can think things like that, but tomorrow or the following day something else may turn up. Why did we have to be maintain the abduction theory? This was not possible.

CC: No, it is necessary to investigate another possibility…

C: And that a father should bear, as Carmen says, being charged with murder himself whilst the case of his child is solved. Therefore leaving the country, saying I’m going, because they are going to investigate the hypothesis of murder …

CC: One of them could say, I can not bear it, can not take it, emotionally this seems to me super cruel, and the other, because of course …

PC: I do not know if you remember, Carmen, the interview in Antenna 3 with the two of them, with the father and the mother in the moment in that he, who is the coldest person of the couple, she is more vulnerable, you say very well he is a surgeon, he is a man …

GA: Yes …

PC: … accustomed, to taking decisions, he, when the camera is about to continue filming, says to her that she has lost her composure and started crying, “do not say another word”, that is to say that in this couple there is also … commissioner, if the girl is dead, where is she, buried on land or at sea?

GA: Well, this is speculation, we do not speculate, they removed us from the case on October 2 we were working on all that, trying to understand how the death has occurred, in what circumstances and what happened to the body, now in these moments I cannot tell you, the most difficult thing this is …

PC: Of course, and why did they remove you from the case, what did they say to you when they told you: withdrawn from the case.

Part 6........

GA: Before withdrawing me from the case, a director came to see me, who knows me and who tells me, look you have to think that there are cases that have no solution

PC: but it seems to me incredible …

PC: but it seems to me inconceivable …

GA: … I have already said no, we will arrive to where it is possible to arrive, this has not finished for us, later it turned out that I did not give an interview that was attributed to me at a given moment, it happened in an interesting moment, when we were trying to bring the Smith family to Portugal, who said that they saw Gerry McCann, with a possibility of 80 % of having seen Gerry McCann carrying an inert girl towards the beach.

C: An Irish family that seems that they saw the father …

PC: The Smiths …

GA: It was part of the investigation and they removed me, and three or four months passed until the Smith family speaks for the indictment, and this procedure occurs in Ireland, not in Portugal as we had wished. During this time, it is said that this family has been the object of several visits, I do not want to speak about pressures, there have been the object of visits by persons who …

PC: two or three months passed, these Irish...

GA:---had to change their phone number, it is said that they had to move house and resort to the services of a lawyer.

PC: as if they had received pressure …

GA: to avoid these persons … It is sad that this has happened this way, that souldn’t have happened … and now it has been withdrawn from the investigation.

PC: Well, that’s the point I wanted to arrive at.

GA: In the book, the book begins by saying that the indictment was going to be filed, and I do not mean that this was when the case has been already filed, but at the beginning, months earlier, because we knew that it was going to be filed.

CC: It was known that it was going to be filed … because you saw that you would not be conclude.

GA: Yes, and because of facts …

PC: because of political pressure …

C: It is incredible, because it is also an insult to the skill of the Portuguese police, the McCanns in a certain moment say that they are not capable of solving it, an insult to Portugal and in this sense the book is a real apology, or rather I believe that Gonçalo Amaral has done very well in putting in white on black or black on white all that is known about the case and that now all our listeners can know.

We have asked this evening’s listeners to make their opinion about whether the parents are guilty or not, if they were involved in the disappearance of Maddie’s body and 36 % of our listeners say that they are not guilty but, listen to this: 64 %, a large majority of listeners, say that yes, Maddie's parents are involved, the thesis you have already heard, the other two children had been conceived by IVF, the McCanns had had reproduction problems for a long time, it had been difficult for them to have children and the British authorities are very tough on parents who commit negligence in the case of having given sleeping draughts to the children and would have taken the children away, withdrawn custody of the other two ...

Part 7............

PC: and they were doctors …

CC: I find that hard to believe, I don’t know about the legislation over there …

C: Its very tough in Great Britain …

CC: … but even so I can’t imagine it …

GA: only a minute is necessary, not hours … in one minute …

PC: it is possible to demonstrate that, with them both being doctors …

GA: It is negligence …

CC: but it is possible to prove it, it is not negligence the fact is that we are not machines, from the medical point of view, that is very easy, we are not machines.

C: Yes, but in Great Britain …

CC: the same medication, for one person …

PC: no but, but what the inspector says is that a minute is enough, then it is possible to demonstrate that it was an accidental death, but with the sole fact …

GA: They are English …

CC: if they administered a sleeping draught to the children and that as a consequence of this medicine, British legislation would take the children away in a minute, as he says, the paternal custody and the children would be taken away.

GA: but you do not even need the medicine, it is enough to leave them alone as they did …

CC: that is, that they went for dinner and left them alone …

GA: … another thing, its all of the children, not only Madeleine who has disappeared, but the twins who also left alone, all the children of other friends also. They were all left alone.
And it is not possible to say that these children were not at risk, that there was no danger, because if they had not been in danger Madeleine would not have disappeared.

CC: Of course.

C: Certainly, and it is even possible that the McCanns might have been helped by this group.

CC: No, what the inspector says is that all the other couples who went to have dinner with them did the same. They left the alone children and they could also have the custody of their children taken away from them.

C: Therefore the group of British couples who met for dinner leaving their children alone, very probably could have helped the McCanns to make the body disappear, of course there are so many people involved.

GA: I do not say to make the body disappear, but at least to invent the story of the checking, to give the impression that the children and Madeleine were safe. It is said that they went every five minutes …

CC: they went …

GA: but that night, only that night, they all went to see the girl. This is interesting because the McCann couple never went to check the others’ children

C: OK

CC: They were going to see Madeleine, all of them, every five minutes and why not the others’ children who were also sleeping alone.

PC: As the commissioner says, it seems to be of a crushing logic

C: OK. Everything seems quite logical and clear, in this sense, 64 % of our listeners say they have clear criteria

Anyway, we now thank Gonçalo Amaral who at least tries to clean the reputation of his country and of the police of his country, I believe that this is a very noble desire and a very noble motive, to explain…, to write the book and in any case he has provided this text from the publishers Esquilo: Maddie: The Truth of the Lie, which as I say has sold more than 200.000 copies in Portugal.

Many; thanks for being with us.

CC: congratulations

GA: Thank you very much.

C: Thank you

http://joana-morais.blogspot.com/2008/11/el-patio-do-you-think-madeleines.html

Ambersuz wrote:Part 1.....


Cristina López Schlichting - C
Carmen Candela – CC
Pilar Cambra - PC
Gonçalo Amaral - GA

Cristina López Schlichting: It was a tricky affair because the McCanns - Maddie's parents, as you know, launched an international fund raising appeal, have appeared in all the media, they put obstacles in the path of journalists and finally, they insulted the Portuguese police. The person in charge of the Maddie case, former inspector of the Portuguese PJ, was removed from his job and is now retired, precisely because of this case, an individual who had a brilliant police record behind him and who had solved all the previous cases that ended up in his hands.

Now he has revealed all that he knows in a fascinating book, 200 thousand copies sold in Portugal, " Maddie: The Truth of the Lie” (Esquilo ed.).

C: Gonçalo Amaral, good afternoon

Gonçalo Amaral : Thank you very much

C: Thank you very much for being here with us today.

GA: Its my pleasure.

C: Well, in effect you tackle the principal aspects of the Maddie case and have a very bold thesis: do you agree?

GA: Well, I do not have a thesis, the thesis is that of a team of investigators, composed of Portuguese and English police officers, who in September of last year prepared a report that is included in the investigation files, which says that the girl died on May 3rd in the apartment, that the body was concealed and that a crime scenario was simulated, that of abduction.

C: That’s clear. The commissioner says the little girl died on the same day she disappeared, on May 3, 2007, the body was concealed and abduction was simulated. Pilar Cambre has a question concerning this.

Pilar Cambra: I have a question, because you state that the parents gave the girl a sedative, Calpol, because she had problems sleeping …

GA: Yes.

PC: … of insomnia, and that this medication probably led to her death, and that from that point … or that it is possible that the girl, upon getting up from her bed under the effects of this medicine, could have sustained a heavy fall, which caused her death. You deduce as proof, that her siblings who were sleeping in the same room, even when the room was full people, did not wake up when the investigation began. My question is: how is it possible to state that the girl, Maddie, Madeleine, died as a consequence of consuming a sleeping draught and that she died from a blow, if the body has not been found?

GA: It is in the book and is in the indictment, which points to death by accident, it was accidental. Death because cadaver odour and human blood were found behind a sofa, that is why it is considered that an accident could have happened.

C: In other words, there was blood and cadaver odour.

GA: Exactly. This is what we had in October of last year when I left the investigation. Also, in addition to this, it was considered that the girl had a problem with falling asleep and with sleeping and whether the parents, like other parents in England were giving her Calpol to sleep. It is said that there is a Calpol generation in England, because the mother says that it is a medicine, paracetamol and there are experts who say that it is an antihistamine with sedative effects.

GA: Well, I do not have a thesis, the thesis is that of a team of investigators, composed of Portuguese and English police officers, who in September of last year prepared a report that is included in the investigation files, which says that the girl died on May 3rd in the apartment, that the body was concealed and that a crime scenario was simulated, that of abduction.


Thats enough for the Mccann to sue, so why dont they?

Excellent interview

Now why dont the British press interview him to get his story?

LaMisty wrote:Excellent interview

Now why dont the British press interview him to get his story?

Clarry wont let them

LaMisty wrote:

Ambersuz wrote:Part 1.....


Cristina López Schlichting - C
Carmen Candela – CC
Pilar Cambra - PC
Gonçalo Amaral - GA

Cristina López Schlichting: It was a tricky affair because the McCanns - Maddie's parents, as you know, launched an international fund raising appeal, have appeared in all the media, they put obstacles in the path of journalists and finally, they insulted the Portuguese police. The person in charge of the Maddie case, former inspector of the Portuguese PJ, was removed from his job and is now retired, precisely because of this case, an individual who had a brilliant police record behind him and who had solved all the previous cases that ended up in his hands.

Now he has revealed all that he knows in a fascinating book, 200 thousand copies sold in Portugal, " Maddie: The Truth of the Lie” (Esquilo ed.).

C: Gonçalo Amaral, good afternoon

Gonçalo Amaral : Thank you very much

C: Thank you very much for being here with us today.

GA: Its my pleasure.

C: Well, in effect you tackle the principal aspects of the Maddie case and have a very bold thesis: do you agree?

GA: Well, I do not have a thesis, the thesis is that of a team of investigators, composed of Portuguese and English police officers, who in September of last year prepared a report that is included in the investigation files, which says that the girl died on May 3rd in the apartment, that the body was concealed and that a crime scenario was simulated, that of abduction.

C: That’s clear. The commissioner says the little girl died on the same day she disappeared, on May 3, 2007, the body was concealed and abduction was simulated. Pilar Cambre has a question concerning this.

Pilar Cambra: I have a question, because you state that the parents gave the girl a sedative, Calpol, because she had problems sleeping …

GA: Yes.

PC: … of insomnia, and that this medication probably led to her death, and that from that point … or that it is possible that the girl, upon getting up from her bed under the effects of this medicine, could have sustained a heavy fall, which caused her death. You deduce as proof, that her siblings who were sleeping in the same room, even when the room was full people, did not wake up when the investigation began. My question is: how is it possible to state that the girl, Maddie, Madeleine, died as a consequence of consuming a sleeping draught and that she died from a blow, if the body has not been found?

GA: It is in the book and is in the indictment, which points to death by accident, it was accidental. Death because cadaver odour and human blood were found behind a sofa, that is why it is considered that an accident could have happened.

C: In other words, there was blood and cadaver odour.

GA: Exactly. This is what we had in October of last year when I left the investigation. Also, in addition to this, it was considered that the girl had a problem with falling asleep and with sleeping and whether the parents, like other parents in England were giving her Calpol to sleep. It is said that there is a Calpol generation in England, because the mother says that it is a medicine, paracetamol and there are experts who say that it is an antihistamine with sedative effects.

GA: Well, I do not have a thesis, the thesis is that of a team of investigators, composed of Portuguese and English police officers, who in September of last year prepared a report that is included in the investigation files, which says that the girl died on May 3rd in the apartment, that the body was concealed and that a crime scenario was simulated, that of abduction.


Thats enough for the Mccann to sue, so why dont they?

They are scared sh....less of Amaral and they know he's the only guy who'll blow the lid off their fund raising world.