I know there was nothing in the PJ files which pointed to abduction as the crime which had been committed apart from the parent's insistence.
1 The alarm was raised at 10.15pm, but first officers did not arrive in Praia da Luz until 11pm and the disappearance was not taken seriously enough
“This is an unacceptable delay, regardless of what they thought had happened to Madeleine,” says Colin.
“Even if they thought she had innocently wandered off, it should not have taken them 45 minutes to arrive.
“In a missing person case there is a judgment to be made about how it is treated. If it’s a 21-year-old who is missing after being out clubbing, you are not as worried as you would be about a missing three-year-old.
“I would like to think that any police officer who is told a three-year-old girl has gone missing will be instantly taking it extremely seriously.
“The question is do you treat it like a crime scene that needs to be preserved right from the start or is the most likely explanation that she wandered off? The Portuguese police were widely criticised for not sealing off the scene, making it a crime scene.
“But if there is a chance the missing girl could be wandering around lost in the immediate area, then that rightly takes priority. You are prioritising searching the immediate area rather than sealing off the scene.
“If there is sign of a violent struggle or forced entry then it would be different, but that wasn’t the case with Madeleine’s disappearance.
“If there was sign of forced entry, then your thinking starts going down the line of crime rather than just a missing person. But in the absence of any evidence your natural thought is she has wandered off.
“You think, ‘Let’s start looking for her’, rather than thinking of anything as sinister as abduction.
“That would have been the call for the uniformed officers who were first on the scene at the Ocean Club.
“Once she was not found in the immediate area then I would have asked the officers to look for evidence of a crime.
“I can well imagine that the Portuguese police’s initial thoughts were that they were going to find the little girl wandering around in her pyjamas no further than half a mile from the apartment.
“When the searches have proved fruitless I would want to talk to the parents.
“Very quickly there should have been the realisation that this was a crime rather than something more innocent. That should have been realised within 30 minutes, but in Madeleine’s case it clearly wasn’t realised all that quickly.
“It was not taken as seriously as it should have been.”https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/6-errors-madeleine-mccann-detectives-10272590According to Colin Sutton you've got it all entirely wrong yet again.
The parents were right to suspect foul play - again according to Sutton.
Thirty minutes should have been the optimum elapsed time scale before treating the disappearance of a three year old child as a serious incident - once again Sutton's opinion which coincides with that of other child protection experts. Madeleine had already been missing for longer than that before the first responders arrived on the scene, so her parent's instincts about proper procedures which should have been followed was spot on.
Add to the mix a witness sighting of an unknown man leaving the vicinity carrying a child and I think you've got a situation for checking what CCTV there was and checking vehicular traffic travelling away from the town at night.