Five years after Madeleine's abduction Amaral was still making appearances on Portuguese television programmes promoting his perception of what had happened to Madeleine.
Never ceasing to point a finger in the direction of the most investigated couple in the world.
How different things might have been had they been investigated as they should have been and when cleared as they would have been enabling the investigation to progress to the next stage.
That just could not happen when the lead detective was like a wee dog with a bone which under no circumstances was he going to relinquish.
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HC: The question is, following that thesis regarding the hypothesis that the girl was carried in a bag…
JP: In a golf bag.
HC: In a golf bag or in a sports bag, the question is...JP: Let me just show the picture. [Behind HC and GA there is a flat TV screen, Gerald McCann carrying a Golf bag is shown] Here it is, Gerry McCann with the golf bag, I have to stress that this picture was taken by a British photojournalist, Brian Bould.
HC: Without prejudice, I am not saying that it was Mr. McCann, it's different.
What I am saying is, in the hypothesis - which was one of the theses at that time - that the girl was taken from the bedroom, carried inside a golf bag, or inside a sports bag, by whomever made her leave the bedroom, and then carried her through the golf field to the cliff... We already know, and it is not difficult to understand, that is not possible to throw a 30 kilos2 body from that point, because the body would never fall inside water, never.
With a small rock, a rock with the size of a hand, it is impossible to toss it into the ocean. So, the question is, would it be possible for the girl to have been kept hidden at the cliff area and then be taken from there?
GA: It is possible; indeed that is the thesis, the conclusions that are reached by the police until September of 2007. That the child’s body was kept somewhere. In the first night, the body was taken from the apartment and placed somewhere, and it was not detected.
The searches made that night were to find a living child not a dead one.
Then later, we know, because of the indicia, we get that information from the indicia that was found in the car rented 20 days later, that probably a body, a cadaver was placed there and it was likely Madeleine McCann. The FSS handled the information…
HC: We will speak about the FSS later on.
GA: I am talking about the information, we only had the information.
I’m not talking about what can be proved or not. The information that the police had and was working with. We were at six months from the beginning of the investigation, we should have followed that line, to understand where that body – if there was a body – was placed…
HC: But the question is, how is it possible to keep a body in that cliff without cadaver deterioration? JM blog
I find that conversation among supposed professional men quite incredible in content and direction and an indication of prevailing attitudes which led to the total collapse of Portuguese interest in the case beyond the supposed guilt of the parents and how best to "prove it"!
If it was contributions such as this that set the tone in Portugal - and I think it was - what chance was there ever that Madeleine's case could rise above the penny dreadful they turned it into.