Met given 6 months and £2 million more to find Maddie. Is this the end?

[Lyall]

That's right..SY have to convince the Portuguese that due to the incompetence of the PJ they need to allow SY to investigate..that should be fairly straightforward

Maybe you should have been urging the papers to abandon their slurs against the Portuguese police.

(Maybe the McCanns should have been doing that too. I didn't see anyone doing it).

[ferryman]

That is part of the difficulty, but you cannot lay all the blame at the door of the Portuguese as the British Press have attempted to do.  Leicestershire Police and Scotland Yard were both involved in the original investigation together with several other British advisers and experts so they too must bear their share of responsibility for any mistakes.  The parents too and the other members of the tapas group are not without blame for their conduct, quite appalling really.

The British understood the forensic results while the Portuguese (with the possible exception of Inspector Dias) didn't ....

[ferryman]

Maybe you should have been urging the papers to abandon their slurs against the Portuguese police.

(Maybe the McCanns should have been doing that too. I didn't see anyone doing it).

Amaral certainly wasn't slurred.

I do accept that a great deal of honest endeavour and effort by Portuguese police engaged in the investigation did not receive the recognition or credit it deserved.

[Alfred R Jones]

Maybe you should have been urging the papers to abandon their slurs against the Portuguese police.

(Maybe the McCanns should have been doing that too. I didn't see anyone doing it).

The McCanns had their own newspaper slurs to deal with, remember them?  I don't suppose those ones offended your sensibilities one bit.

[Eleanor]

I very much doubt that they still have a mortgage, Eleanor.
If I truly believed that I could find and bring my missing child home at the cost of losing my home and causing a wee bit of unaccustomed discomfort to my other children...............I would do it!
 
Lets hope the profits from the book, savings and their salaries, can finance any further searches, when the fund has finally been wound up (if ever)

Anna, of course they still have Mortgage.  What family of their age do you think hasn't?

[Lyall]

The McCanns had their own newspaper slurs to deal with, remember them?  I don't suppose those ones offended your sensibilities one bit.

Many of them did actually.

But they were done by mid-2008.

Slurs against the Portuguese continue in our papers to this day. They are not likely to be helping are they.

[Lyall]

Amaral certainly wasn't slurred.

I do accept that a great deal of honest endeavour and effort by Portuguese police engaged in the investigation did not receive the recognition or credit it deserved.

Even yesterday's John O'Connor LBC bit that people have been praising included the apparently compulsory 'they were let down by the Portuguese' line.

What's the point of saying it eight years later?

Police in any country can struggle with investigations like these. There are numerous examples in this country also, as O'Connor knows very well.

[Eleanor]

That is part of the difficulty, but you cannot lay all the blame at the door of the Portuguese as the British Press have attempted to do.  Leicestershire Police or Leicestershire Constabulary as it was known in 2007 and Scotland Yard were both involved in the original investigation together with several other British advisers and experts so they too must bear their share of responsibility for any mistakes.  The parents too and the other members of the tapas group are not without blame for their conduct, quite appalling really.

The McCanns never had any reason to defend themselves.   And The PJ can stuff itself.
Let us see some excuses for their behaviour.  Some logical reason for why they hounded Kate McCann above all others.

Never in all my born days have I seen anything so awful without cause.

[Lyall]

The McCanns never had any reason to defend themselves.   And The PJ can stuff itself.
Let us see some excuses for their behaviour.  Some logical reason for why they hounded Kate McCann above all others.

Never in all my born days have I seen anything so awful without cause.

Hounded her? They let her husband sit in the room with her for the first interview, and didn't see her again formally for four months. That's hardly hounding!

[Alice Purjorick]

I would say they have been exonerated and that's why I used the phrase totally exonerated...ie ...in terms that even you would find difficult to argue with

So you believe that exoneration is not absolute and has degrees?
To be exonerated one must have been charged with something; remind me what the McCanns were charged with and by which agency?

[slartibartfast]

The McCanns never had any reason to defend themselves.   And The PJ can stuff itself.
Let us see some excuses for their behaviour.  Some logical reason for why they hounded Kate McCann above all others.

Never in all my born days have I seen anything so awful without cause.

The first thing they needed to do was make sure the police didn't consider them suspects. Unfortunately most of their actions had the opposite effect.

[ferryman]

Even yesterday's John O'Connor LBC bit that people have been praising included the apparently compulsory 'they were let down by the Portuguese' line.

What's the point of saying it eight years later?

Police in any country can struggle with investigations like these. There are numerous examples in this country also, as O'Connor knows very well.

The McCanns were let down by a process that, certainly falsely, fingered them when they were patently innocent of any criminal wrong-doing.

[slartibartfast]

The McCanns were let down by a process that, certainly falsely, fingered them when they were patently innocent of any criminal wrong-doing.

IYO oF course.

[Mr Gray]

So you believe that exoneration is not absolute and has degrees?
To be exonerated one must have been charged with something; remind me what the McCanns were charged with and by which agency?

I need to remind you as we have had the same conversation before...the court of public opinion....you are playing silly semantic games trying to score points...you are scoring points but they are all own goals I'm afraid...

and yes...in the real world there are different levels of exoneration...just as there are different levels of innocence...as in Barry George...not innocent enough to receive compensation

[Alfred R Jones]

Many of them did actually.

But they were done by mid-2008.

Slurs against the Portuguese continue in our papers to this day. They are not likely to be helping are they.

Can you give some examples of what you consider to be recent press slurs against the Portuguese police please?