The police in the Algarve for some reason seemed to have had a bit of a mental block regarding proper investigation of cases of missing children and murdered children in their jurisdiction.
It also seems they are not too fussy about who they nail for it as long as their crime sheets are cleared. Perhaps failure to catch the actual perpetrators may explain why there was a proliferation as the perpetrator/s were free to continue doing whatever it was they were doing while someone else was behind bars serving time for their crime.
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Len Port, now an Algarve publisher who covered the case for The Portugal News, said: "The police search was highly inefficient, as, frankly, was everything else about the case. The way the police handled it was desperately amateurish - and ultimately, a travesty of justice."
Just as they would later do with the McCanns, the PJ soon hit on a suspect who knew the victim and her family.
But according to Port, who attended his trial, it had "no real evidence. It was an unjust trial".
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Just as they would later do with the McCanns, the PJ soon hit on a suspect who knew the victim and her family. But according to Port, who attended his trial, it had "no real evidence. It was an unjust trial".
The defendant was Michael Cook, a British expat businessman who had taken part in the search, and in 1992 he was convicted and sentenced to 19 years. Having protested his innocence, he was released in 2002. Last week, he told of his ordeal for the first time.
"This has ruined my life," he said. "I still carry the scars from the six times I was stabbed in prison; as for the times I had the s*** kicked out of me, I long ago lost count."
Following Cook's conviction, his then-Labour MP, Bob Spink, became involved in his campaign. In a Commons debate in 1992, he said: "The only hard evidence linking Cook to the murder was bogus" - a claim by an elderly gardener that he had seen Cook bundling Rachel into his car.
However, Spink said, the police had hidden the fact that tyre tracks left by Rachel's abductor "were of an entirely different type" from those that would have been made by Cook's vehicle.
The PJ, Spink told the Commons, claimed Cook confessed - something he has always denied - and that they had tortured him: "Cook appeared in court, with black eyes and a missing tooth, and he was deeply bruised.
"It is claimed that Cook was hung from an upstairs window by his feet, that his feet were beaten until he could not stand, that he was tied to a chair and beaten, that he was deprived of sleep and that a revolver was forced into his mouth and the trigger pulled in a mock execution."
The PJ also claimed Cook had a record as a paedophile, Spink went on. This, too, was "entirely bogus'. The trial judge had asked a PJ witness how he knew this: "The officer replied that someone, unnamed, had told him. The judge accepted that so-called 'evidence' as clear and unequivocal."
It emerged at the trial that while there was no forensic link between Rachel or her clothes and Cook's car, blood had been found under her fingernails - presumably that of her attacker. But when Cook's lawyers tried to obtain it to test it for DNA, they were told the samples had been "lost".
Cook told The Mail on Sunday: "I was with the PJ four days and they gave me no food nor let me go to the lavatory - I literally s*** myself and p****d myself. I was in that state when they first brought me to court.
"What I learnt about Portugal is that once convicted, you never get the chance to get it reversed, because they destroyed the evidence."
Spink, who is still MP for Castle Point, Essex, said yesterday that as the Madeleine case had unfolded, he had become increasingly concerned by the "disturbing parallels' between the way the PJ had dealt with Maddie and the murder of Rachel Charles.
"In both cases, there was incompetence at the outset. And then, having become convinced they had the right suspects, the police seem to have ignored other avenues of investigation - especially the possibility that both were abducted by a stranger."
