But why did Portugal do nothing about this? I simply cannot get my head around it.
My opinion
- a general lack of importance attached to crimes perpetrated against women and children
- incompetence and corruption of the Portuguese police
Random crimes particularly when committed against a transient population of holiday makers must be particularly difficult to pin down, particularly if the onus was to get issues cleared as discretely as possible without unduly alarming the tourist trade on which the economy depended.
Hindsight is an exact science. But passport theft and the theft of cameras and anything else not nailed down is serious but not as serious as the sexual offences which were rife from one end of the Algarve to the next. Yet no-one bothered to collate them or look for a pattern.
The McCanns and their companions were put through years of hellish innuendo and downright accusation by people who knew about the systematic abuse of children in their beds.
Nobody bothered to link those crimes with the vicious rape of an older women carried out in a Luz villa. But most damning of all was the failure to link two abductions of female children from two adjacent villages.