In the Channel 4 programme 'Searching for Madeleine' this is what the four experts had to say about the bins :
JS: Back in town, our team discover another intriguing hiding place. They spot large industrial bins all over the resort.
DB: (to camera) There have been cases in the UK where bodies have been disposed of in wheelie bins and then taken directly to refuse tips and dumped there in the hope that they would be covered up.
CP: We were told to search everywhere, including the bins and in Praia da Luz they're quite big and scary-looking. Although I saw police searching, I personally didn't see police looking in the bins like we did. But I don't think we looked in every bin.
GL: There's a world of difference to looking in a refuse bin and tipping it on its side, emptying it all out, looking in every bag and re-filling it. When you've done that then you can say there's no pyjamas, there's no body in there.
JS: Dispatches has learnt that the bins are emptied nightly between midnight and 4am. And even though a major search for a missing child was going on, they were still emptied on the night Madeleine disappeared. Since the collections were not stopped, there's another area Gary Ligg knows needs prompt attention but it's thirty kilometres away.
GL: We need to find out where the land-fill site is; talk to the authorities, find out where it went and try to identify which area of the land fill these particular bins were emptied.
CS: (to camera) Ideally you would secure all of the bins in the immediate area and make sure that the local authority don't dispose of any of the contents until the search team have had the opportunity to check them all.
JS: We asked the Portuguese police whether the bins and local landfill had been searched. They chose not to comment.
The experts were :
CS = Chris Stevenson (former Detective Chief Superintendent, Cambridgeshire Police)
DB = David Barclay (Former Head of Physical Evidence UK National Crime and Operations Faculty)
DC = David Canter (Director, Centre for Investigative Psychology, University of Liverpool)
GL = Gary Ligg (Former Senior Search Adviser, West Yorkshire Police)
After hearing this, I asked a French ex-inspector whether the French police would have immediately stopped the collecting. He said likely not. But then I spoke to a Canadian inspector and he said yes, because it happens there.
These 4 experts thought of it because it had happened in the UK that bodies were disposed of in bins.
It seems it is the most radical way of concealing a body for good.
The PJ visited all the bins and went on a landfill, but it was days after.
