So, Anne Guedes... can you give us your opinion about the Smith sighting?
Yes I can. I'm not sure about the carrier, but I've no doubt the little girl he carried was Madeleine. Was she in a coma or was she dead ? Likely the second. Did he kill her ? I don't think so. Predators use, kill and leave behind, they don't carry corpses.
Just my opinion !
Carry her for over 400 metres in an area swarming with tourists on a night out? In any event that is not where the tracker dogs ended up.
I will be introducing this subject tomorrow with maps showing where the police dogs tracked Madeleine to.
Caution with that one, John.
There are two types of scent living humans emit and different types of tracker dogs that track them. There is an aerial scent that identifies humans as distinct from other animals, but does not differentiate one human from another; and there is a scent deposited at, or just above ground level that, like a signature or a complete DNA profile, differentiates one human as unique from another.
The overwhelming majority of tracker dogs are of the type trained to track the aerial,
generic human scent.
Dogs trained to track the ground-scent are rare and specialised. In Britain, they are called
scent article method or
SAM dogs. There is only one police force (based in Dyfed, Wales) that has them.
I'm not convinced those GNR officers who were deployed to Praia da Luz had them. Certainly Mark Harrison says that the GNR deployed aerial scenting dogs.
And the handler of the dog that was given the towel to sniff says that it is likely his dog might have been distracted by competing scents, which would not be a problem for a dedicated SAM dog.
None of that should be interpreted or construed as criticism of those officers deployed who, faced with a stark choice between giving up on Madeleine or mixing-and-matching as best they could and trying their hardest on
behalf of Madeleine, opted to give it their best shot, ill-equipped for the job asked of them. No one could, or should, criticise them for that.
But certainly in the very earliest stages, a SAM dog is what might have benefited the search for Madeline most ...