We know Op Grange have been looking into sex attacks on girls in the Algarve in the 2000s
We know that McDonald is a paedophile who was living in the area at the time of the attacks.
Newspaper reports make it clear that McDonald was questioned by the Met.
"Sceptics" won't accept it, however, based on reasons that are not clear to the rest of us.
Weird, but not surprising.
CEOP annual review 2009-10.
McDonald was arrested in Australia in 2001, but fled to New Zealand. There he was picked up, but granted bail on the basis that he handed in his passport. In Nov 2009 he fled to the UK using a stolen passport, and from there CEOP managed to track him to the Algarve.
The CEOP report does not specify when he was picked up in New Zealand, so it is possible he travelled to the Algarve, returned to New Zealand, got picked up, handed over passport, then stole another passport.
From memory, although there were reports in the media that he had been in NZ for years before he fled, such reports are in papers of roughly the same quality as the Mirror, so I don't intend digging this lot out again.
On balance, it looks like he was not in Portugal for the date of the attacks (2004-2010), and not in the Algarve in 2007.
As to whether he knew of paedophile activity that may have been occurring in 2007 on the Algarve, that is another matter. But I would have thought if such involved Madeleine, someone somewhere would have offered this up by now.
Unless you have definitive proof that he was in the Algarve in 2007, please don't claim he definitely was. He almost certainly wasn't.
