I agree.
It was, however, a diligence that should have been carried out and wasn't. Therefore the PJ were within their rights to request it. For them, the outcome was perhaps less important than the 'dotting of i's and crossing of t's' prior to archiving the case.
The refusals to attend by the witnesses handed the moral high ground to the Portuguese authorities. They were willing to keep on investigating.The friends and acquaintances of the McCanns were unwilling to cooperate with them.
Yes, I agree with quite a bit of that.
My impression is that Rebelo was a box-ticker - not out to "get" anyone or play at King Kong, just trying to quietly clear up what he could of the general mess within a very limited time.
It was indeed a diligence that could be requested, possibly with no more intent than making sure that no one could complain that he'd ignored the possibility of organising one.
I can imagine that deciding not to attend wasn't appreciated - and some kind of reprimand was deemed appropriate. However, IMO, the prosecutor went a bit overboard on that one.
On the T9 + 1 side, I can also understand their suspicions. I'd be astonished if they weren't aware of a certain bizarre "reconstruction" in Amaral's only other major case as a coordinator and what that led to. Without the benefit of hindsight, they had no way of assessing whether Rebelo was fair and objective or not.
Russell apparently discovered (cf rog) that the date had been leaked to the media (I haven't seen this, so I've no way of verifying that). I've no idea whether he saw it personally, or whether someone simply told him. True or false, the media had stalked them outside their home and even at his place of work in anticipation of an imminent arrest based on yet another half-baked leak.
They would presumably have been aware, by that time, that there was no way that attending it could lead to taking the investigation back to zero and follow up on leads that didn't involve the arguidos due to time constraints.
Rightly or wrongly, I can well imagine that they feared being paraded under the media projectors to instructions according to some pre-ordained scenario, and somehow being "stitched up", and made arguidos themselves for one reason or another. In that sense, their question of "how will this help find Madeleine?" seems valid to me.
If they were indeed already suspicious, I can also imagine how they may have interpreted the request NOT to bring their children as hardly appeasing:
2 - There is no need for the witnesses to be accompanied by their children. For efficiency and celerity purposes, we indeed request that the children don't accompany their parents;http://www.mccannpjfiles.co.uk/PJ/RE_ENACTMENT.htmSo, if indeed 277/2 is the correct interpretation, they are no longer suspects in the investigations in either country, but because they are no longer arguidos, there is no presumption of innocence protection.
Does that therefore leave them in a limbo land in which they have no legal redress over perpetual accusations of unproven criminal activity?
