I knew I vaguely remembered something about a van seen near where Joana disappeared.
'Disturbing Similarities' With Madeleine
12:48pm UK, Monday May 12,
2008Alex Watts, Sky News Online
The family of a girl who vanished just seven miles from the Portuguese resort where Madeleine McCann disappeared are convinced the cases are connected.
Joana was last seen near church
On the day of Madeleine's fifth birthday, Joana Cipriano's relatives have urged detectives to investigate links between the two disappearances - saying there are too many disturbing similarities for the evidence to be ignored.
Joana, eight, was sent to buy some groceries from a village store near her home in Figueira, at around 8pm on September 12, 2004.
She bought a tin of tuna and some milk from the Ofelia store, and was last seen by a neighbour walking back near the village church, some 200 yards from her home.
Joana never returned and, like the McCanns, her mother Leonor mounted a campaign to find her. Like them, she and her brother Joao became suspects.
The case, which ended with the pair being sentenced to 21 years, made Portuguese legal history - it was the first murder trial where a body was never found.
Police officers are due to go on trial later this year for allegedly beating and torturing Leonor to make her confess.
Joana's relatives told Sky News Online the pair are innocent and believe whoever took the girl is also behind Madeleine's disappearance, seven miles away in Praia da Luz.
The family, who do not want to be named, said: "This sort of thing doesn't happen in Portugal - child abductions are very rare.
"Whoever took Joana took Madeleine too, the distance is too small. And the police ignored everything we told them, they just wanted to solve the case quickly.
"They didn't look at any of the things we told them about."
They said the most crucial bit of evidence was a white and brown camper van, parked near Joana's home in the days before she was abducted.
The vehicle, with German number plates, disappeared around the time she vanished.
They added: "There was a man living in there, but he hardly left the van. A week later the van was found abandoned in farmland in Praia da Luz. We told the police to investigate it, but they didn't listen to us."
She said the man had short, curly brown hair and was about 40 years old.
A suspect in the Madeleine case, spotted acting suspiciously near the apartment where she vanished on May 3 last year, was described as between 35 and 40, with long, straggly hair.
Criminologist and child protection expert Mark Williams-Thomas believes there are far too many similarities between the two cases for it not to be a strong line of police inquiry.
He says that because of the huge doubts over the Cipriano convictions, whoever abducted Joana is more than likely to be behind Madeleine's disappearance.
Like Madeleine's case, the police investigation got off to a bad start, with officers failing to seal off the house where she was last seen.
Leonor alleges police beat her to make her confess. A photograph of her heavily-bruised face was published in Portuguese newspapers.
Goncalo Amaral, a senior detective who was sacked from the Madeleine case, is one of the five officers charged in connection with extracting the confession.
The indictment reportedly alleges that they kicked her, hit her with a cardboard tube, put a plastic bag over her head, and made her kneel on glass ashtrays.
Amaral faces charges of negligence and perjury, another officer is accused of fabricating a document, and the three others are charged with torture
https://themaddiecasefiles.com/disturbing-similarities-with-madeleine-sky-12-05-0-t7551.html
