There have been a number of official suspects or arguidos in this case including expat Robert Murat, Russian national Sergey Malinka and Maddie's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann. None of them have come out of this smelling of roses for one reason or another.
Let me say firstly that it is by no means unusual for the parents of a missing child to attract suspicion since most child abduction cases do involve persons known to the child. In this case however there are other peripheral events which leave many questions still to be answered. Those events include the refusal by Kate McCann to answer the simplest questions when formally interviewed, the voluntary non participation by the parents and their friends in a reconstruction of the events on the night Maddie disappeared, the savage attack on certain Portuguese police officers and the detective who led the original investigation. Then there was the Oakley International debacle involving fraudster Kevin Halligen which saw a secret Report and e-fits withheld from the public. Add to this the murky business involving the Madeleine Fund and the Spanish private detective agency Metodo 3 and a certain pattern begins to develop.
The Archive Report issued back when the original enquiry was shelved for lack of evidence stated that the parents had "failed to demonstrate their non involvement" and the Portuguese Supreme Court has more recently been forced to make the unprecedented declaration that the parents have not been cleared.
The Madeleine Fund itself has attracted much criticism. Far from being the transparent Company it was initially set up to be to handle donations from the public, it has morphed into something else with accounts and payments shrouded in secrecy.
Are all these events interrelated or is there more to this than meets the eye?
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