A Knight On The Tiles by Dr Martin Roberts

This latest scoop, analysis, exposé, call it what you will, proffered by Dr Roberts is all of those things, but primarily it is the latter, an exposé. An exposé, given Antonella Lazzari's previous track record, that treats the woman all too lightly for my money.

And what a hack record it is, being described by myself previously, as Antonella Lazzari's list of shame, for it is nothing other than that, shameless. A shameless list of hackery of appalling taste and manipulation churned out in the gutter press with one purpose in mind, to sway public opinion away from the obvious. The obvious being of course, that the McCanns are guilty of all they are suspected of.

But what Dr Roberts exposes in his piece below, is not just a case of bad journalism, it exposes something far darker than that. It exposes a degree of pre-knowledge, pre-planning, and a catalogue of lies that border on the criminal. And this to say nothing about the morality of Lazzeri's concerted efforts, both present and past, conspiring to sanctify the parents of a long dead Madeleine McCann. 

~

A Knight On The Tiles

By Dr Martin Roberts
23 June 2016

Where might a titled visitor to Praia da Luz choose to go for the occasional not-so-incognito tipple?
The following list of PdL bars catering for English clientèle is derived from those recommended by two tourist guide web sites, namely: Cafe & Bars - Bars info

Locations
The Bull
 Clive’s Bar
 Godots
 Junction 17 (aka Carlos’ Bar)
Kelly’s
Luz Tavern
JD’s
The Snug (opened 2011)
Olly’s Bar (opened 2011)

Intriguingly, neither the bar Barroca (known until 2011 as The Plough and Harrow) nor The Pig’s Head (situated in Burgau) appears among these specifically ‘English’ suggestions.

Which means that a complete stranger (a visiting journalist, say) would not be drawn to them necessarily.

Now let us suppose our inquisitive journalist was smart enough to check out their options before arriving. They might, if they were particularly interested in the ombibulous habits of a deceased dipsomaniac, see fit to exclude those establishments more recently inaugurated. That would still leave them with more than half-a-dozen venues to visit.

Then what? Do they embark on a pub-crawl spread over the two or three days they have at their disposal? And to what purpose exactly – simply to establish that ‘Kilroy woz here’?

All of which brings us to the question of how it was that Antonella Lazzeri and her photographer side-kick found themselves in the Pig’s Head on Friday 17 June, barely three days after the UK media had ‘unmasked’ the late Sir Clement Freud and asking after his patronage there. It turns out he had visited that venue just once, twenty years ago. Big deal. The very next day Antonella announces to the world that Freud and Robert Murat were ‘on nodding terms’, the latter also having visited the Pig’s Head but once, a mere eight years or so ago (see how their paths don’t quite cross?).

But Lazzeri’s real ‘shock-horror’ discovery is that Freud frequented that other place (Bar Barroca), which, under its previous identity (The Plough and Harrow), had garnered an unfortunate reputation, predicated upon the alleged behaviour of the then landlord’s son, Christian Ridout.

How on earth did Antonella come by the information that this Luz centre locale was once nicknamed the ‘Plough and Paedophile’? Would either the present licensee or a current client have told her that? Nor does she explain who gave this little drinking secret of Freud’s away (protecting her source no doubt). It presented her with the platform for her scurrilous article though. For without a connection, however tenuous (if not fabricated), to impropriety of some sort, the discovery that Sir Clement was known to go out for a drink every once in a while wouldn’t have sold many copies. Nor would it pump oxygen into the ailing abduction hypothesis put forward to explain the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

By making it to the Pig’s Head, some two miles distant from the Ocean Club, Antonella Lazzeri seems to have gone out of her way, literally, to uncover a non-connection with the McCann case. Was she sober at the time, having already crossed the other candidate venues off her sightseeing list? Or did she only call into the two inconspicuous establishments as previously instructed, if indeed she visited Bar Barroca at all?

Give the devil his or her due. Antonella quite possibly researched the Plough and Harrow 'nearby', as she puts it, before she left London, the origins of the epithet ‘Plough and Paedophile’ having previously been announced by the Daily Mail – nine years ago come December.

As our diligent lady journalist has seen fit to inform us, “Christian Ridout, 32, whose parents owned the bar and lived next door to Murat, has never been traced.” Except that two of her very own SUN colleagues, Gary O’Shea and Emma Smith, had already traced him.

Following the Mail’s lead by just a couple of months (February 2008), they reported that Ridout was working as a Hollywood paparazzo, under the pseudonym Dexter Troy. Apparently they “found the ex-DJ there after a tip from a fellow snapper”, despite O’Shea’s being credited with writing from Praia da Luz. (It clearly takes a special talent to become a SUN journalist)

Maybe next time Antonella needs a photographer with local knowledge of PdL she’ll know who best to contact.

Dr Martin Roberts

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Tania Cadogan: Ponderings On Those Famous Pajamas And That Stain

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A Nightwear Job by Dr Martin Roberts

I have my own twopenn'orth added at the bottom of the page. Ed.

Update: Tania Cadogan: Ponderings On Those Famous Pajamas And That Stain

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A Nightwear Job
By Dr Martin Roberts
March 9, 2016

As published in the Telegraph

Author unknown

In the very nearly nine years since the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and the eight since the parents had their arguido status formally withdrawn, one simple question has passed publicly unanswered, probably because the answer appears obvious and the question therefore not worth the asking. I shall ask it nevertheless:


Who took the McCanns' 'official photograph' of Madeleine's pyjamas?


The image in question was 'released' to the world's media in the late afternoon of 10 May, 2007, following a press conference that day. It was no doubt assumed by many that, since the PJ released the photographs (there is more than one), the PJ themselves must have taken them. Yet a film distributor who arranges the release of a 'blockbuster' is hardly likely to have spent the previous months/years actually doing the filming.


With this seed of doubt in mind, one might consider what the PJ did with their photograph(s), adhering all the while to the worldwide practice, among law enforcement agencies, of 'continuity', whereby the progress of evidence through the system, in whichever direction, is recorded at each step along the way. Whereabouts, then, did they file this particular 'diligence' of theirs?


Within the relevant Forensic report (23 November 2007) are references to the following images, together with cognate views of a pair of pyjama trousers:

A far cry from earlier publicised representations you will admit.

Why on earth should the PJ have seemingly undertaken the same photographic work twice, involving two quite different sets of pyjamas?

The forensic record (of garments correctly pictured alongside a scaling reference, i.e. a ruler) is that of a pair of pyjamas supplied on request by M&S (UK), afterwards forwarded to the Forensic Laboratory in Lisbon by Goncalo Amaral, together with a covering letter dated 7 June. It has nothing whatever to do with the official photograph released in early May. In fact the clothing pictured has more in common with that featured in the retailer's own contemporary stock photograph, a copy of which was sent to the Algarve Resident, again on request, and which the 'Resident' published on 8 May - two days before the official release.

As published by the Algarve Resident

During a press call at the Amsterdam Hilton, on 7 June, Kate McCann took pains to explain that the pyjamas being exhibited at that time were in fact Amelie's, and that Madeleine's were not only bigger but did not feature a button-fastening t-shirt. Only a couple of days earlier the same pyjamas, again described as 'Amelies' and 'a little bit smaller', were presented on 'Crimewatch', but without reference to the button discrepancy.

It stands to reason of course, that, Madeleine McCann's pyjamas having been abducted, a surrogate pair would have been required for photographic purposes, in the event of there being no extant photographic record of the clothing in question. But appropriate photographs were to hand. They already existed. One version, as we have seen, was published by the Algarve Resident, another by the BBC. The McCanns' 'official' version was consistent with neither of these. With the PJ yet to physically access a representative set of pyjamas, why should they have been called upon to photograph anything else for immediate release?

There is no record of their having done so. Ergo they did not. So who did? And where did the pyjamas come from that enabled them to do it?

Addressing the second of these questions first, the garments featured in the PJ release cannot have come from M&S locally, since all their Portuguese branches had been closed years before. Had they come from M&S in the UK they would obviously have resembled the pair sent to (and genuinely photographed by) the PJ. A pointer to their origin is, however, to be found within the case files.

Alongside a suite of photographs taken at Lagos Marina by Kate McCann is an introductory memo, written by DC Markley of Leicester Police on or about the 8 May and headed up, 'Information from the Family'. Here also one finds the only copy (in black and white) of the McCanns' official photograph of Madeleine's pyjamas (Outros Apensos Vol. II - Apenso VIII, p.342). Rather than its being a PJ production, afterwards passed to the McCanns, it seems the photograph was actually a McCann production fed to the PJ, an observation wholly concordant with the fact that it was actually the McCanns who first revealed this photograph to the press, on Monday 7 May, three days before the PJ released it (as reported by Ian Herbert, the Independent, 11.5.07).

Any illusion that the image in question was the result of a McCann representative's commissioning their own studio photograph of 'off-the-shelf' UK merchandise may soon be dispelled. It is an amateur snapshot. Taken in ambient (day) light, against a coloured (as opposed to neutral) background, it is slightly out of focus and displays detectable signs of parallax. It is not something even a journeyman professional would admit to.

And yet, bold as brass, it represents 'information from the family'.

Perhaps it was produced by a member of the McCann entourage that descended on Praia da Luz over the long weekend 4-6 May? Then again, perhaps not. As Kate McCann explains in her book, 'madeleine' (p.109):

“Everyone had felt helpless at home and had rushed out to Portugal to take care of us and to do what they could to find Madeleine. When they arrived, to their dismay they felt just as helpless – perhaps more so, having made the trip in the hope of achieving something only to discover it was not within their power in Luz any more than it had been in the UK.”

On Kate McCann's own admission, to a House of Commons committee no less, neither she nor husband Gerry were any more capable of keeping cool under fire during this time. Having earlier (August 2007) told her Pal, Jon Corner, "the first few days.…you have total physical shutdown", she went on to advise the House that, despite being medically trained, she and her husband "couldn't function" (John Bingham, the Telegraph, 13.6.2011).

Well someone on the McCann side of the fence managed to function in time for the parents to appear before the media on 7 May with a photograph that, so far, no-one seems to have taken, and of clothing which, other things being equal, ought not even to have existed anywhere inside Portugal, except, perhaps, in the clutches of a fugitive abductor. But, of course, other things are anything but equal.

Non mihi, non tibi, sed nobis

A month after the world's media were first shown a picture of something resembling Madeleine McCann's 'Eeyore pyjamas', a real set was being touted around Europe. Described by Kate McCann as 'Amelie's' and being 'a little bit smaller', they were held aloft for the assembled press brigade, without any one of them questioning the pyjamas' origins either. Being 'Amelie's' was quite enough, apparently, to justify their also being in the McCanns' possession at the time. Since when though? Gerry McCann did not return home to Leicester from Praia da Luz until 21 May, time enough for him to have raided his daughter's wardrobe for something he might need on his European travels, but way too late to have met any 7/10 May deadlines.

It seems, then, as if the two ingredients required to achieve an earlier photograph of 'Madeleine's' pyjamas (the photographer and the subject) were both missing. So how was it done?

What at first appears to be a riddle is soon solved when one realises that the pair of pyjamas which accompanied the McCanns around Europe was the very same pair that starred in their 'official photograph' taken earlier. Kate McCann took public ownership of them before the television cameras the moment she referred to them as 'Amelie's'. On close inspection these pyjamas (Amelie's) are revealed as identical to the pair previously pictured in both the Daily Mail (10.5.07) and the Telegraph (see top of page here), down to the stray threads dangling from both upper and lower garments. This means that 'Amelie's pyjamas', for want of a better description, were also present with the McCanns since the start of their Algarve holiday.

As published by the Daily Mail

Suddenly the question ceases to be 'Who photographed a representative pair of Eeyore pyjamas?' and becomes, instead, 'Who photographed Amelie's pyjamas?' Furthermore, if everyone was feeling so shell-shocked as to render them incapable from the Friday, when did they have the presence of mind to take the requisite pictures?

We begin to edge toward a sinister conclusion once we take particular account of the literal background against which these particular pyjamas were photographed.


A coarse woven tale

Unlike the various studio renditions of Eeyore pyjamas to which we have been introduced, the McCann's official photograph(s), versions of which were published by both the PJ and the UK media, present the subject laid out against a blue textile, rather than the more customary piece of artist's board. This blue upholstery, for that is unquestionably what it is, helps define who, among the Tapas 9, might have been the photographer.

The Paynes, the Oldfields and the O'Briens can be ruled out. Only the Payne's apartment incorporated any soft furnishings in blue, but of a different quality to the plain open-weave material on display here. During the early morning of Friday 4 May, 2007, the McCanns were re-located to alternative accommodation in apartment 4G - another in which blue soft furnishings were conspicuous by their absence (it was appointed in beige throughout).* Added to which the concern, lest we forget, is with photography involving a pair of pyjamas known to have been in the McCanns' possession from the outset.

In his statement to Police of 10 May, Gerry McCann as good as exonerated himself of all blame concerning picture taking:

‘Asked, he clarifies that:

apart from the personal photos already delivered by him to the police authorities after the disappearance of his daughter MADELEINE, he has no others in his possession. 

He adds that it is:

his wife KATE who usually takes pictures, he does not recall taking any pictures during this holiday, at night.’

Notwithstanding accounts of how, from the Friday onwards, the McCanns, their nearest and dearest, all fell mentally and physically incapable (of anything save visiting the pool, the beach bar, and the church on Sunday morning), Kate McCann early on made a very telling remark, concerning photography, to journalist Olga Craig:

"I haven't been able to use the camera since I took that last photograph of her" (The Telegraph, May 27, 2007).

That statement alone carries with it a very serious connotation. However, we still have a distance to travel.

The more contrastive of the two images reproduced here displays what appear to be areas of shadow, when in fact there are no local perturbations at the surface of the fabric to cause them. Similarly, the dark bands traversing the t-shirt appear more representative of what is actually beneath it. These visible oddities suggest the material is in fact damp and 'clinging' to the underlying upholstery.

There is, as we know, an anecdote of Kate McCann's, which sees her washing Madeleine's pyjama top on the Thursday morning. As re-told in her book, she does so while alone in the family's apartment:

"I returned to our apartment before Gerry had finished his tennis lesson and washed and hung out Madeleine’s pyjama top on the veranda."

Size matters

As previously stated, Kate McCann was careful to bring the attention of her Amsterdam Hilton audience, to Madeleine's pyjama top being both larger and simpler than the version she was holding in her hands at the time. She was inviting them instinctively to associate garment size with complexity - the larger the simpler in this instance. It would mean of course that Madeleine's 'Eeyore' pyjamas, purchased in 2006, would not have been absolutely identical with those of her sister Amelie, purchased whenever (but obviously before the family's 2007 holiday on the Portuguese Algarve).

On 7 May, the Sun reported that:

"The McCann family also disclosed that on the night of her disappearance Madeleine was wearing white pyjama bottoms with a small floral design and a short-sleeved pink top with a picture of Eeyore with the word Eeyore written in capital letters.
"The clothes were bought at Marks and Spencer last year."

In his 7 June covering letter to the Forensic Laboratory in Lisbon, Goncalo Amaral conveys the following specification in relation to the pyjamas he was intent on sending for examination:

"The Pyjamas are from Marks and Spencers, size 2 to 3 years -97 cm.

"The pyjamas are composed of two pieces: camisole type without buttons"

Since these items could only have been supplied to the PJ in mid-07, they must have represented that year's style, as it were, for 2-3 year olds. Madeleine would have been four years old by this time. However, Kate McCann would have people believe that 'Amelie's' pyjamas, sporting a button, were designed to fit an even younger child. Had Kate purchased the appropriate pyjamas for Amelie in 2007 of course, they would not have had a button at all.

They must therefore have been purchased in the same epoch as Madeleine’s own, i.e. during 2006, when Amelie would have been a year younger and somewhat smaller even than when the family eventually travelled to Portugal the following year.

The significance of all this becomes apparent once we consider those photographs which show how the pyjamas held aloft by the McCanns at their various European venues encompassed half Gerry McCann's body length at least. Photographs of the McCanns out walking with their twins in Praia da Luz, on the other hand, illustrate, just as clearly, that Amelie McCann did not stand that tall from head to toe. Even In 2007 she would have been swamped by her own pyjamas, never mind the year before when they were purchased.

In conclusion, the McCanns' 'official photograph', first exhibited on 7 May, appears to be that of a damp pair of pyjamas, too big to have been sensibly purchased for Madeleine's younger sister that Spring, and most certainly not the year before. The subject is set against dark blue upholstery of a type not present in any of the apartments occupied by the McCanns or their Tapas associates immediately after 3 May. Kate McCann has explained, over time, how she was alone in apartment 5A that morning, in the company of a damp pyjama top (having just washed it) and how, from that afternoon by all accounts, she 'couldn't bear to use the camera', an automatic device (Canon PowerShot A620) belonging to a product lineage with an unfortunate reputation for random focussing errors.

Madeleine was not reported missing until close to 10.00 p.m. that night. If Madeleine McCann's pyjamas were not in fact abducted, then nor was Madeleine McCann.

Martin Roberts

*See the extended search videos here: http://www.mccannfiles.com/id167.html

Grateful thanks are due to Nigel Moore for collating a number of highly relevant photographs and media reports in connection with this topic.

Link

1) Forensic photograph of couch in apartment 5A

2)Pyjamas belonging to the McCanns

 Not definite, but . . .

H/T Grande Finale


If a fellow thought that the Metropolitan Police Service was a functioning entity, he might call for the arrest of the McCanns based on what is written and depicted here. Ed.


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The Sirens of The Lambs by Dr Martin Roberts

The Sirens of The Lambs

By Dr Martin Roberts
February 10, 2016

“Eeyore, Eeyore”

It would appear that much can be gleaned from the ‘sound of sirens’, just as Simon and Garfunkel once suggested. Jenny Murat in particular was in no doubt about that on the morning of Friday 4 May, when interacting with a lady journalist (Maria Cecilia Pereria Peres) and an unidentified male, while visiting unoccupied premises in Praia da Luz. According to the journalist’s account of their conversation (as given to police on 23 May, 2007):

“The previous night she heard the Police arrive, due to the sirens, according to her at 22h00. The old lady said she had been eating dinner with her son when she heard the sirens, that is the Police, it being that it was at that time that she became aware of the disappearance of a girl from the ‘Ocean Club’.”

Thus sirens at 22.00 equals ‘Police’, associated with personal awareness of a little girl’s disappearance.

Immediately one has to ask how any of this is at all possible, when the local police were not contacted until 22.40 and the first patrol to arrive turned up at 23.00? Even they didn’t know the nature of the crime they were sent to investigate until they asked at the Ocean Club reception!

Jenny Murat seems to have been ahead of the game somewhat.

When interviewed by police 11 days later (15 May) she had rather more to impart:

“About 19h50 she went to the ‘Batista’ supermarket to buy bread. Then she went back to the house where she arrived more or less at the same time as Robert. Later they sat in the kitchen where they were talking for some time, having also eaten.”

And

“While they were talking in the kitchen, she is not able to say when, she recalls having heard a siren ringing at least once. Although not usual, she also did not "connect" because it could possibly have been an ambulance. (She recalls that sometimes, when the wind blows in a certain direction, it is possible to hear in the house sirens of police cars or ambulances that pass on the EN125).”

So, sirens don’t necessarily equal ‘Police’ after all, their sirens being indistinguishable from those of ambulances in Portugal, according to Jenny Murat at least. Wrong. The Portuguese emergency services (police and ambulance) operate quite different sirens on their vehicles, except at night, when they are not utilised at all.*

If we now juxtapose this observation of Jenny Murat’s with that of her son Robert on the same topic, things then take a very odd turn indeed.

From his arguido statement of 11 May we learn that:

“He was home with his mother, when at 22:30 or a little later, he heard a siren of an ambulance or police. He commented on that with his mother, however, did not leave the house to investigate. He did not leave again until the morning, having gone to bed around midnight.”

Once again the identity of the siren remains unspecified.

Besides wondering why anyone would step outside their house to ‘investigate’ a distant siren, there is an obvious discrepancy between the two reports of half-an-hour to account for. However, if an emergency services siren should be heard in the Portuguese Algarve, any unfamiliarity with the sound would be dispelled by seeing the vehicle to which it belonged. If Robert Murat didn’t bother to take a look outside the house, and there is no indication that his mother did so, how was she able to conclude, for the benefit of her Friday morning acquaintance, that a siren heard at 22.00 signalled the police arriving to investigate the disappearance of a little girl?

Given her advancing years, and offering a generous helping of charity, we might imagine that Jenny Murat latched onto the detail of events as reported earlier that Friday morning and simply ‘put two and two together’ as regards the siren she says she heard at 22.00, and which her son describes as audible at ’22.30 or a little later.’ In reality, even had the GNR turned up at the Ocean Club with their siren wailing (which we have it on good authority they did not), it wouldn’t have been much before 23.00. And what we do not get from either of the Murat’s is a conspicuous connection between the sound they claim to have heard a considerable distance away and a more blatant announcement in Praia da Luz, anything up to 30 minutes, or even an hour, afterwards.

The pearls of redacted uncertainty do not end there however.

Selfless altruism?

Kitchenalia

According to Robert Murat (in relation again to the Thursday):

“(He) headed for his residence, where he arrived between 19.15 and 19.30….He does not know if his mother was at home, but thinks so….After entering, he may have taken some tea and turned on the TV or it was already on. He may also have read a newspaper. He talked with the mother, who if she was not there had arrived shortly afterwards…. He ate a sandwich of cheese and ham sitting in the kitchen with his mother, until 22:00 or 23:00.”

So Robert’s mother, Jenny Murat, may (or may not) have been at home when Robert himself may (or may not) have had a cuppa, and may (or may not) have turned on the TV, before reading a newspaper (or not) and speaking to his mother (who, don’t forget, may not in fact have been there at the time).

And this from someone who purports to be a businessman?

But do let’s pay attention to the last of the imponderables in this instance:

“He ate a sandwich of cheese and ham sitting in the kitchen with his mother, until 22:00 or 23:00.”

Jenny Murat too has a ‘take’ on what transpired in her kitchen, and when. It is somewhat different to her son’s account however:

“She recalls that they were talking until close to midnight”.

Some latitude in recall is all very well, but 11.00 p.m. cannot be considered ‘close to midnight’, much less 10.00 p.m. Things start to go even further awry when the PJ question Robert Murat a couple of months later (11 July):

“Questioned he says that when he heard the sound of a siren he was with his mother in the kitchen, still talking, it would be about 22:00/22:30”

And then the ‘maybe, maybe nots’ are remorselessly exposed:

“He remembers that at one time he spoke with his mother, however he cannot recall whether she arrived meanwhile or she was already there. He remembers that they were sitting in the kitchen and the defendant remembering that he ate, how long with his mother he does not remember. Confronted with the testimony of his mother who told that she arrived at the house around 20.30 and that Robert had also arrived at that moment, he says that he cannot account for having arrived at the same time as his mother.”

What are we to make of these peculiar discrepancies?

First, let’s reprise a particular couplet of Robert Murat’s:

“He ate a sandwich of cheese and ham sitting in the kitchen with his mother, until 22:00 or 23:00.”

and

“He was home with his mother, when at 22:30 or a little later, he heard a siren of an ambulance or police.

Obviously, if option 1 (22.00), embedded in the first of these statements, is correct, then Robert Murat would not have heard the later siren from his mother’s kitchen at all. If the siren event were genuine, he must have been conversing with her there for longer to have heard it from that same location. And if it were not genuine?

If the siren were more imaginary than real, then Robert Murat could conceivably have parted company with his mother as early as 10.00 p.m. Of course “She recalls that they were talking until close to midnight”, but then she also either fails completely to recall when she heard the mystery siren, or positions the experience chronologically at 10.00 p.m.

The bottom line, as they say, is that, of the two persons who experience the same unidentified sound, only one, Robert Murat, places it comfortably within the hour between 10.00 and 11.00 p.m. His mother puts it no later than 10.00.

Since it is an occurrence they apparently discuss between them, we might suppose Robert Murat’s whereabouts at the time to have been his mother’s kitchen. Both the fact of the siren and its timing are of some significance therefore. ‘Genuine and late’ affords Murat the younger an alibi for an hour of some importance. ‘Fictitious or early’, however, and he could have been anywhere. Jenny Murat does her level best to repel boarders by talking until ‘close to midnight’. Unfortunately for her son, she seems unable to defer what they were talking about.

The power of suggestion

Another reprise is appropriate:

“He was home with his mother, when at 22:30 or a little later, he heard a siren of an ambulance or police. He commented on that with his mother, however, did not leave the house to investigate. He did not leave again until the morning, having gone to bed around midnight.”

Besides driving home the point that ‘he did not leave the house to investigate’ (Why would he? The supposed siren was nowhere near), Murat junior describes having ‘commented on’ the siren ‘with his mother’.

This seems an odd turn of phrase; one which has probably migrated in translation from, ‘mentioned to his mother’ (as in, ‘Did you hear that siren, mother?’), following which, Jenny Murat dutifully logs the experience in her mind’s ear, to be recounted in due course. There is no reciprocal suggestion on her part that she brought the sound to her son’s attention or ‘discussed’ it in any way. As she says, she did not ‘connect’ with it.

Robert Murat, having introduced a shared, putatively relevant exterior reference, is therefore free to position it in time, thereby confirming his own whereabouts. What he fails to anticipate, however, is his mother’s dogged refusal to advance her own auditory clock beyond 22.00, even by half-an-hour.

This is yet another story badly told. Just how badly we may judge from the following:

RM: “He ate a sandwich of cheese and ham sitting in the kitchen with his mother, until 22:00 or 23:00.”

JM: “She recalls that they were talking until close to midnight”

And to which we might add:

RM: “I was in my mother’s kitchen until one a.m.” (to Judy Bacharach, Vanity Fair contributing editor, and reported in the article, ‘Unanswered Prayers’, Jan. 31, 2008).

Between them Robert Murat and his mother wish it to be known that Robert went to bed that night, sometime within the four-hour period 10.00 p.m. to 1.00 a.m. Given such a range, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that Robert Murat was not in fact inside the house at all between 10.00 and 11.00 p.m., never mind the kitchen.

Of course ‘they were talking until close to midnight’.

Really.

If there is one item of domestic equipment the use of which is guaranteed to kill any conversation stone dead it is a computer.

Robert Murat had no recollection of using a computer that night, a situation confirmed by forensic analysis of his personal device, which CEOP, in their report complementing that of the PJ’s own technical staff, helpfully labelled ‘Robert’. However, there was another device in almost continuous use that same night, and which CEOP have identified as ‘Jenny’ (no prizes for guessing to whom that one belonged). According to CEOP, ‘Jenny’ the computer was switched on and utilised by Jenny the user, from 10.00 p.m. until 11.34. If Jenny Murat was ‘talking’ all that time, then it was via a keyboard.**

Placing the last of Robert Murat’s above-mentioned claims in its proper context disperses a little more fog:

“All I can say is that I am innocent. There is no way I was at the resort that night. Full stop. I was in my mother’s kitchen until one a.m. Yes, we are a kitchen kind of family. I spent the night at the house.”

Robert Murat may not have been at the resort, but there are lots of other places he might have been. And spending the night somewhere is what we do when we sleep through the early hours. It does not necessarily embrace something we might choose to do beforehand, whether there or somewhere else.

Robert Murat’s explanation of his whereabouts during the crucial hour 10.00 – 11.00 p.m. on Thursday night 3 May, 2007, is clearly suspect, his alibi being furnished unconvincingly by his own mother, who, when interviewed subsequently by the media said, on her son’s behalf, that he was

"Very bitter. Somebody has set him up."

"How do you think that happened?"

"We don't know. Probably the people who did it."

I can understand being angry (livid actually) at being ‘set up’ by a perfect stranger, but ‘bitter’? That’s more a description of how one might feel toward a duplicitous acquaintance, close or casual.

And who set Robert up? Why, ‘The people who did it’. Not the by-now-over-the-hills-and-far-away abductor you’ll notice, but the people plural, who had obviously stuck around to see to it that Robert Murat was ‘clocked’ that Thursday night.

This was of course Jenny Murat talking, not Robert. That’s what it looks like anyway. But when you consider that she is describing her son’s emotions, how on earth is she to know he feels ‘bitter’ without either asking him or being told. It’s not something one can read in another’s facial expression. For this moment on record, therefore, it is indeed Robert Murat talking, albeit by proxy, and it behoves us to listen just as carefully to what is being said here as to the sound of sirens.

 Martin Roberts


*a previous discussion of the siren story can be found here, under the title ‘All the world’s a stage 1/3’: http://textusa.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/all-worlds-stage.html

** The CEOP report of Jenny Murat’s computer usage is of further interest in that it does not tally precisely with the data exhumed by the PJ. Certain activities recorded by the PJ, and of potential interest, are given scant mention by CEOP. On the other hand CEOP refer to tasks, e.g. a call to ‘Romigen.com’ on the night of 3 May and subsequent computer gaming, of which the PJ’s own ‘trace’ provides no record. It is noticeable, possibly noteworthy, that Jenny Murat spent 12 minutes examining, reading and deleting e-mails on the afternoon of 2 May, something she did not do on the 3rd, the 4th or the 5th. It was during the morning of 2 May of course that Gerry McCann received those dozen voicemail messages that he and his PR henchman have always strenuously denied. (see pages 1152-1159 and 1164/1165 here: http://www.mccannpjfiles.co.uk/PJ/OUSTROS_APENSOS_1_6.htm

Access All Areas by Dr Martin Roberts

 In retrospect there are a couple of topics surrounding this case to which I feel I should have given more attention, the crèche records to mention one and Robert Murat another.

My reasons for not doing so, or my excuse if you will, is that the amount of work I was producing at the time was such, that some areas of this case received less than my undivided attention. In truth the crèche records receiving no attention whatsoever.

But of Murat I can offer no excuse, I committed the cardinal sin, I took him at face value. And if there is one thing this case has taught us, nothing but nothing can be evaluated thus.

There was one occasion however when Murat chinked my hinky meter. After having . . .

"the total and utter destruction of mine and my family's life and caused immense distress"

for which he was duly compensated, later went on to utter this:

Mr Murat said: “It must be a ­tremendously difficult time of year for them and of course as a human being you feel for them and for the loss of their daughter. Express

Now I know it could be a matter of personalities, but had I gone though all the trauma that Murat claims to have experienced, I don't think I would be quite so forgiving, or quite so magnanimous. Far from it. Very far from it. 

Given the subsequent revelations writ below, I conclude that every word that has passed Murat's lips is suspect, and by default must also include anything said by his mother, Jenny Murat.

~

ACCESS ALL AREAS

By Dr Martin Roberts
15 October 2015

On the 4 May, 2007, following the international (no less) announcement of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance from apartment 5A, the Ocean Club literally played ‘open-house’. Robert Murat, who was on the scene and talking to GNR officers that very morning, later said, when questioned as ‘arguido’ on 14 July:

“Together with an officer of the GNR and an employee of the resort with several keys, entered several apartments, opened with the keys or by the tenants in order to locate the child. Some of the apartments were closed and there were no keys, these sites were flagged by the GNR man.

“At that time he met John Hill, manager of MARK WARNER, who supplied them with more keys to other apartments.

“Prior to this occasion, he did not know the interior of the "Ocean Club", only entering the resort after the disappearance.

“In the meantime the tracker dogs arrived that undertook a more rigorous form of search.”

Sure enough. There is a statement on record from Marina Castela (Ocean Club general manager), taken on 16 May, which describes Robert Murat’s entering various apartments as he later said, but not quite the way he said it:

“She saw the suspect, Robert Murat, for the first time on that day at about 12.30 when the witness went to meet GNR officers whom she cannot identify, to open the doors for them and speak to guests staying in apartments in block 6….

“When she was beginning this task together with GNR officers, this individual appeared, she does not know from where, he immediately saw what operations were going on, speaking ostensibly to the guests from the first two apartments, explaining to them what they were doing there, showing much will and anxiety in the transmission of this information.

“Given his behaviour, for a few minutes the witness thought that he belonged to one of the security forces, namely the PJ.

“The GNR officer who was with them did not speak any English nor say anything.

“After the second apartment, the witness says that Robert's attitude was not the most correct, as he spoke to the guests in a very dry and affirmative way and she took the initiative to introduce herself to the clients, not letting him speak.

“She thinks that is the reason why he immediately disappeared and did not accompany them to the rest of the apartments.”

Not exactly the tandem task as described by Murat. John Hill also seems not to have put in an appearance on this occasion either (in his own statement to police of 20 June, he makes no mention of his own activities that day or any interaction with Robert Murat for any purpose whatsoever).

Since Ms Castela describes Murat’s intervention here as occurring shortly after 12.30 p.m., we might suppose that he was dressed in a blue t-shirt and jeans – not because she says so, but because others did.

Sisters Annie Wiltshire and Jayne Jensen were reported (The Sun - 27 December, 2007) to have interacted socially with Robert Murat that very same day (4 May), having not long previously been to the police to report having seen two men acting suspiciously on the ground floor balcony of a supposedly empty (block 5) apartment the afternoon before (3 May). The sisters apparently thought it odd when Murat announced:

‘I must go and shower and change, I’ve been in these clothes all day.’

According to their account, he had been in a striped shirt and grey trousers not long beforehand.

This report was picked up from one first appearing in the Portuguese press (Diario de Noticias). The Sun also tells how the sisters ‘have given an "extensive interview" to cops detailing their suspicions about suspect Robert Murat’ (and of which there is no trace among the files released to the public – perhaps because the sisters apparently voiced their concerns to Leicestershire Police on their return to the UK, and the questionable Spanish agency Metodo 3 subsequently, their information welcomed by that ubiquitous ‘source close to the investigation’).

The reliability of Witshire and Jensen’s further sighting of Robert Murat (outside the apartments on the night of 3 May, and deemed significant by that aforementioned ‘source’) is of less immediate relevance than their description of Robert Murat’s keenness to divest himself of a blue t-shirt, which he had presumably done by the time he made his way to block 6 and his interaction with Maria Castela. Although she had misgivings about his demeanour, she made no comment as to his ‘sweaty’ attire.

Someone who did observe Robert Murat’s style of dress, however, was property manager Barend Weijdom (interviewed by police on 16 May, 2007). He recalled seeing Murat on the morning of 4 May dressed in a yellow shirt and light coloured trousers. These may or may not have been grey, but Weijdom makes no reference to stripes in respect of the shirt (as distinctive a feature as its colour one would imagine).

Blue t-shirt, yellow shirt, striped or otherwise, wearing the garment since breakfast hardly equates to ‘all day’ endurance when scarcely noon. If the Wiltshire-Jensen retelling has any substance, then there is something odd about Murat’s apologia to them, just as there would seem to be about his inspection story, as it relates to Block 6 at least, especially since none of the GNR officers interviewed, including dog handlers, recorded having been in the company of one Robert Murat that morning, 4 May. But someone else did.

Barend Weijdom’s role as property manager saw him responsible for apartment 5E, which, like 5J diagonally above it, was unoccupied at the time. Such was his professional concern, that on the morning of the 4th he suggested to the authorities that they check it out, in case it too had been entered inappropriately (the McCanns having first reported a break-in don’t forget). The core of Weijdom’s statement is particularly germane:

“He went to the apartment with a GNR officer and after a few seconds Robert Murat also entered the apartment without anyone having requested his presence.

“The witness says that he found Murat's presence in the apartment to be strange, adding that after he entered the apartment he gave the witness a 'pat on the side' and said 'thanks for your collaboration'. During this situation the witness thought that Murat worked for the police. On that morning the witness saw Murat moving around the site a lot…”

Here, at last, we have Robert Murat entering an Ocean Club apartment in the company of a GNR officer and one other. Except he didn’t. He followed them inside. And far from being an Ocean Club employee brandishing a set of keys, Weijdom was an independent operator, making use of one key in his possession. (It seems as if Murat has deliberately conflated his experience at 5E with that of his later visit to block 6).

Robert Murat’s explanation of his activities in relation to this sorry tale are therefore inaccurate, and not for the first time. Weijdom’s brief account enables us to draw a few pertinent conclusions besides.

Murat’s attention grabbing (‘Look at me, I’m a policeman’) behaviour, enacted in the presence of Maria Castela and her GNR associates at Block 6 on the Friday afternoon, had first been practised in and around block 5 that same morning. Apartment 5E was one of six in block 5 that were not in Mark Warner’s custody, so to speak (E, F, G, J, N, O were not on cleaner Maria da Silva’s rosta). Since we know that 5G was occupied by its owner, Mrs Fenn, and that responsibility for 5E had been delegated to Barend Weijdom (who had a key to the place), it seems only reasonable to suppose that 5J, also known to have been empty for quite a period of time, was itself owned in absentia, and the key left in the charge of a local ‘manager’ (such as Barend Weijdom, for example).

We don’t really know what Robert Murat was wearing that morning; the different accounts conflict. We can however tell that his self-aggrandizing explanation for his presence in and around the Ocean Club on Friday 4 May is an exaggeration at the very least, a lie at worst, as is his claim, again made during his ‘arguido’ interview that:

“never in his life has he entered the apartment where Madeleine was when she disappeared, neither before nor after the events under investigation."

‘Never’ was a rather dangerous word to use under the circumstances, especially when one considers Weijdom’s further evidence:

“On that morning the witness saw Murat moving around the site a lot and saw him enter and leave the apartment Madeleine disappeared from, without knowing whether he was with anyone there. He said that Murat moved a lot between the authorities and journalists.”

Indeed the witness testimony of conscientious Barend Weijdom should be given more than merely due regard:

“He heard about the news being investigated on the evening of 3rd May at about 21.30 - 21.40 from P**** B******, a Dutchman and owner of the Atlantico restaurant, who passed by the witness near the Baptista supermarket, in P da L and who asked for his help in searching for Madeleine.

“He then went to the place where the events occurred which was at about 21.45 - 21.50. At this time various local people and MW staff were present.”

When did Kate McCann say she did her ‘check’ again?

Martin Roberts

Metaphoric Comprehension Revisited by Dr Martin Roberts

For your contemplation, another thought provoking hypothesis from the pen of Martin Roberts.

How near the mark it is I couldn't say, but it would go a awful long way in explaining the anomalous behaviour of successive governments in relation to two hitherto unknown chav medics from the boonies.

It might also go some distance in explaining the totally unbefitting arrogance of the last persons to see Madeleine alive and in whose care she "disappeared",  the parents, Kate and Gerry McCann.

METAPHORIC COMPREHENSION REVISITED

 By Dr Martin Roberts
18 September 2015

Attention switching

Pitiful though it may appear to some, I cannot help but notice certain similarities between ostensibly unrelated events. I mean, whatever can the tragedy of 9/11 have in common with the disappearance of Madeleine McCann?

One notable aspect, for me at least, is the common purpose shared by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST for short), whose report into the collapse of the ‘Twin Towers’ was commissioned by the US administration, and Operation Grange, funded, open-endedly it seems, by the UK government. Both are indisputably endeavours to impose upon the general public an official account of what happened in each case – to the World Trade Centre buildings on the one hand, Madeleine McCann on the other. Both are gratuitously disingenuous. So much so that it hardly takes a leap of logic to infer that the truth must still be ‘out there’, since it is nowhere represented by either of these officially sanctioned undertakings.

However, for the sake of parsimony if nothing else, we should confine discussion to the McCann affair and the misdirection inherent in it.

To quote briefly from a recent facebook/forum comment:

“There is no way on this earth that two insignificant doctors and their holiday companions would be protected by the full might of the British government. Some other event was happening in Praia de Luz that week and that some of those in attendance were powerful movers and shakers who needed to be protected at all costs.

“…some seeking the answer to Madeleine's disappearance will be disappointed if the reason for the protection does not lead to a high level paedophile gang. But it won’t because it isn't the reason.”

Of course there are those who adhere to the notion that the McCanns have accomplished all they have by virtue of their being no more than sharp opportunists, who happened to have had their hands on a few useful professional levers and have gone onto greater things inside the signal box since. The battleground for argument here is usually the explicit exemplars of officialdom’s having taken the couple’s part so readily. ‘Extraordinary!’ cry the conspiracy theorists. ‘Par for the course,’ claim the debunkers. But what of a smaller skirmish about which very little has so far been said?

However influential the McCanns and their T7 allies may or may not have been, it is difficult to see how they might have convinced two Police investigators into the McCann disappearance, one of them a senior and well respected officer in the field of missing persons enquiries, that their future careers lay elsewhere – outside the UK even. I refer of course to Martin Grime (now working with the FBI) and Mark Harrison (now a Police Commander in Australia). How did Team McCann accomplish that?

Our anonymous commentator is of the opinion that some powerful entity outside the McCann circle required protection, but not on account of their association with any paedophile ring. That wasn’t the reason. Which begs the obvious question: ‘What was the reason’?

Apparently, “Some other event was happening in Praia de Luz that week and some of those in attendance were powerful movers and shakers who needed to be protected at all costs.”

For ‘abduction by paedophiles’ one might read ‘destroyed by hijacked aircraft’, since both propositions share the same degree of verisimilitude. Operation Grange have of course adopted the fallback position of ‘body snatching by burglars’, in an attempt to incorporate the small detail of Madeleine McCann’s being dead at the time of departure - about as credible as NIST’s computer modelling of the collapse of WTC7, or indeed any of the hundreds of pages that make up the 9/11 Commission Report, for which countless trees were needlessly sacrificed. (Ed see below)

The inevitable lure here, and the one which has engaged so many for so long, is the urge to get to the bottom of what really happened to Madeleine McCann. And this, with the added frisson of possible misdemeanour involving high status individuals, has, for nearly a decade, successfully steered all our gazes away from the true fulcrum of the drama being played out in the Portuguese Algarve. As per the comment above: “Some other event was happening in Praia de Luz that week.” A ‘tomato fest’ it was not.

Keeping secrets

Certain students of the McCann case, as seen through the eyes of the media for the most part, have derided Goncalo Amaral’s repeated assertions that secret service activities lay behind the ruinous political intervention into the police investigation of which he was co-ordinator. Such a view establishes him as a ‘totem’ for conspiracy theorists, who, according to these learned others, lack a firm grasp of reality. Far too many people (‘three score and ten’?) would have to have been involved for it to work, and they couldn’t all keep a secret could they? Not like the thousands employed at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, or the hundred thousand engaged on the Manhattan Project in the USA, where President Truman was over a week in office before he knew anything about it (http://jpaulson.blogspot.nl/2015/09/911-decade-of-deception-full-film-new.html). (Ed see below)  Then of course we have that inglorious September date in 2001. Has anyone from the directorate ‘squealed’ about that one yet? (And don’t, for goodness’ sake, imagine that’s because there’s nothing to reveal).

Of all those whose opinions concerning the McCann case might be taken seriously, Goncalo Amaral is out in front by a country mile. He was slap bang in the middle of proceedings at the time. So if he reports that a UK police officer (Mark Harrison as it happens) was intercepted by MI5 at Faro Airport then it’s ‘odds on’ the event occurred. So we might ask ourselves, were MI5 tagging along with the diplomatic invasion, like so many opportunist refugees, just in case the people thought by Kate McCann to have been ‘spying’ on her family that week should have absconded with some living embodiment of a state secret or two? Or were they already there?

It’s safe to say that a lot of people were in the Algarve at the time of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance, no doubt representing a variety of nationalities. The T7 were known to each other, but not to fellow diners at the Tapas Restaurant. Even newly-arrived Robert Murat, whose mother’s house was just a short walk from the Ocean Club, was a complete stranger to some, whilst Martin Smith had only seen him on a couple of occasions.

A small township populated by all sorts and frequented by strangers then. Perhaps we should not be surprised therefore at the McCann appeal for holiday-makers at the time to submit to CEOP (led of course by Jim Gamble) any photos that featured unfamiliar faces – you know, the sort of family snap you happen to take just as someone else wanders into view.

Despite Gerry McCann’s personal mantra about the importance of ‘getting information into the investigation’, no photographs trawled in this manner were ever passed onto the PJ, who were conducting it. Furthermore, according to Kate McCann (Crimewatch, June 2007), "Probably about 60% of tourists to this area are British, but following that are the Germans and then the Dutch.” But then we have Gerry’s ‘blog’ of 9 June, 2007, in which he tells us:

“After returning from the beach we did the Irish version of Crimewatch -'Crimecall'. There are a lot of Irish tourists in and around Praia da Luz and although the awareness of Madeleine's disappearance in Ireland is extremely high, we want to ensure that everyone is aware of the appeal and we want the Irish public to come forward with photographs of people who they do not know who were in and around Praia da Luz in the 2 weeks leading up to the 3rd May.”

The Smith family members, whose ‘sighting’ seems to have been of some significance, are of course Irish. Maybe friends of theirs had inadvertently secured an image of the same ‘abductor’ during daylight hours? More generally, and much more likely, such an Irish photographic ‘accident’ might have involved another Irish individual, most probably at a venue frequented by Irish ‘tourists’.

The McCanns and their ‘Tapas’ friends arrived in Praia da Luz over the weekend 28/29 April. Madeleine McCann was publicly reported missing on May 3, whereafter Kate McCann was quite sure ‘They’d been watching us for days’ (well it couldn’t have been a week!). And yet the McCanns, CEOP, and in all likelihood Jim Gamble, who had rather more than one string to his professional bow at the time, were interested in photographs featuring people ‘in and around Praia da Luz in the 2 weeks leading up to the 3rd May’. That’s over a week before the McCanns even arrived.

What surreptitious activity might the suspected abductor(s) have been up to prior to watching the McCanns for a few days? Did they know the McCanns were coming? Had they access to their booking arrangements? Did they take time to reconnoitre likely vantage points for surveillance perhaps? Of course not. Yet someone of interest must have been there, otherwise there would have been no chance of their being captured on film, and concomitantly no point to the appeal for photographs.

The first rule of survival 

‘Take care of no. 1’. It follows that, on a national scale, the first priority of a state is to see to matters of state. And what might matter to the state is not the domestic fate of a young child abroad, nor the criminality, if such it be, of that child’s parents. Thus, faced with the rejection of FOI requests on the grounds that to respond could jeopardize international relations, are we not bound to infer that what was actually being safeguarded was not the good names of a rag-tag bunch of middle-class medics? (See: “A Magical Mystery Tour” and “‘Mad Cow’ Legislation” – McCannfiles, October/November 2009).

So what was happening that spring, in Praia da Luz particularly or the Portuguese Algarve in general, that was neither a tomato fest nor a child abduction? Whatever it was, it was of international significance. Did it have something to do with the Lisbon Treaty perhaps? Nope. That was not signed until December. The Freeport scandal coming to a head? Well that certainly had an international dimension, but it’s difficult to see any immediate connection with the very immediate steps taken to submerge the McCann affair. What say we look at another chain of ‘incidents’ altogether, working backward from 2012?

This from The Portugal News Online of 15 November that year (http://www.theportugalnews.com/news/security-shrouds-trial-of-real-ira-weapons-trafficking-suspects/27190):

“The trial of five men accused of trafficking weapons to supply a dissident faction of the IRA – the Real IRA (RIRA) – began in the Algarve last week under a blanket of tight security.

“Three men from Northern Ireland and two Portuguese nationals are implicated in the case, which dates back to July 2011, when a PJ counter-terrorism unit swooped on a campsite in Olhão and dismantled the set-up.

“Three of the suspects are being held in Portugal, one remains free and the fifth suspect is in Ireland where he is facing extradition.” 

The arrests were in fact reported in the Guardian at the time they occurred (10 July - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/10/portugal-arrests-real-ira-suspects-arms-trafficking).

Continuing with The Portugal News Online:

“It is not the first time RIRA activity has been exposed in the Algarve. In 2009 two men believed to belong to the Real IRA were found to be using a restaurant in the small fishing village of Alvor as a main European base.

“It was at the Panda Grill on the fringe of the village that Paul Anthony McCaugherty and Michael Gregory allegedly negotiated the buying and selling of weapons for the Real IRA, between 2005 and 2006.”

The Telegraph (30.6.2010) explained that these 2009 arrests had proceeded to trial and that

“The trial had heard that the Real IRA was using a restaurant on the Algarve in Portugal as a global hub for weapons shipments to Ireland. McCaugherty met the agent in Portugal and in a number of other locations including Amsterdam and Istanbul.” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/northernireland/7864018/Real-IRA-commander-caught-in-MI5-arms-dealing-sting.html).

Fully five years ago yet another ‘anonymous donor’ left a comment on a popular blog to the following effect:

“Anonymous 23 April 2010 20:34:00

“In my opinion, Jim Gamble was not looking for photos of possible abductors. He was looking for photos that could have identified MI5 operatives. There is a trial scheduled to take place this month (April 2010) in regard to the Real IRA activities in the Algarve. It may not have to do with that case….”

On the other hand it just might.

Given these suspects were only arrested in 2009, in relation to criminal activities conducted between 2005 and 2006, what were they doing in the intervening period – and where were they doing it? A quick look at the map reveals that the ‘small fishing village of Alvor’, otherwise a European base of operations for illegal arms trafficking, is just beyond the headland from Luz, to the other side of Lagos.

And that ‘agent’ the accused was supposed to have met? The Telegraph (30.6.2010) again explains:

“Paul McCaugherty, 43, was caught trying to buy an arsenal of weapons from an undercover agent posing as a Middle Eastern arms dealer.

“The Security Service agent, known as Ali, spent two years meeting McCaugherty and bugging 90 hours of conversations which became the cornerstone of the prosecution’s case at Belfast Crown Court.”

No one was arrested until 2009 remember, which means that this operation was on-going during 2007, the year the McCanns decided to visit the Algarve. And let’s not overlook the headline afterwards carried by the Telegraph (30.6.2010):

Real IRA commander caught in MI5 arms dealing sting

A Real IRA commander has been convicted of attempting to smuggle weapons and explosives into Northern Ireland after being snared by a daring MI5 sting operation. 

From which it is abundantly clear that MI5 didn’t just wander into the Algarve in the wake of the McCanns. They were already there, and had been for some considerable time.

A stitch in time

Picking up on the earlier perspicacity of ‘Anonymous’, as demonstrated on 23 April that year (2010), if there is one thing about which the security services are undeniably scrupulous it is protection of their assets’ identities, and for very good reason.

Examples of this concern (or lack thereof) are to be found in the furore following members of the Bush administration’s deliberately, and maliciously, ‘outing’ CIA field agent Valerie Plame Wilson, simply to spite her husband, a diplomat who had taken a very public moral stand against US foreign policy in the Middle-East. (Ed. Joe Wilson husband of Valerie Plame revues Bush's memoir link)  On the home front, MI5’s eventual willingness to share CCTV images of two of the alleged 7/7 bombers was counterbalanced by their ‘cropping’ the pictures in such a way as to make reliable identification of the individuals nigh-on impossible.

But that’s just for context. What we have for more immediate consideration is an on-going MI5 operation in the Portuguese Algarve, where suddenly, and without prior warning, Police activity is about to go into overdrive, possibly giving locally based targets entirely the wrong impression that they are on the point of being ‘rumbled’ (a moment that was still two years hence), and jeopardizing years of investment in under-cover infiltration in the process. Not to mention the risk of ‘Ali’s being recognised in a context other than that of his role as a putative arms dealer.

Such would have been the situation had the PJ acted without media or other intrusion on the occasion of Madeleine McCann’s ‘disappearance’.

But isn’t that what they did?

Not really. It’s what they did on the night of May 3rd.

Now consider a UK government and its security services appraised of the possibility of such imminent turmoil before it actually kicked off. Say, a few days before. Time in which to delay ‘abduction’ (in lieu of a death) and instruct ‘Ali’, for example, to adopt a low profile elsewhere for the time being. Police spot checks throughout the Algarve would be inevitable, but significant others would at least be out of the firing line. Had the Portuguese been called to action stations without prior reference to MI5 they would have taken everyone unawares, not just Madeleine McCann’s abductor, had there been one that is.

So Madeleine, instead of dying on the Monday, is abducted, as planned, on the Thursday, giving MI5 the breathing space it needed to manage its own activities in readiness. The very prompt (and loud) international media revelation of Madeleine McCann’s abduction ensured that television watchers everywhere would then know why the PJ, the GNR, and all those helicopters, were suddenly so busy, even those who might have been watching in Alvora, and who obviously hadn’t kidnapped anyone.

I know, I know, ‘if this weren’t so pitiful it would be funny’. But there is a paradox attaching to Madeleine’s disappearance which has yet to be addressed by anyone as far as I am aware, and it is this:

If Madeleine McCann was ‘abducted’ in a hurry on the Thursday night, there was not enough time for her to have lain dead beforehand. And if she died earlier that week, then why would Gerry McCann have waited several days before removing the evidence, only to snatch her corpse out bed at the last minute, just before his wife raised the alarm. The reason for the delay, I suggest, was someone else’s.

And let us not overlook the very significant role in proceedings played by Jim Gamble of CEOP, both at the time and since. Who really conjured up the notion of an extreme paedophile operating in Portugal (Madeleine McCann was barely four years old don’t forget), and who, not long previously, had been steeped in the dark practices of the security services in Northern Ireland?

MI5 eventually secured their targets. The McCanns have their ‘hush money’. And Operation Grange is probably just this current financial year away from ‘capping’ the entire episode like a toxic well (they would have done so sooner had a credible reconciliation been available - remember DCI Redwood’s admission that ‘solution’ was not on the menu?). Oh, and in the wake of the ‘St Andrews Agreement’, the Northern Ireland Assembly was restored and a new Northern Ireland Executive formed - on 8 May 2007.

The chances of the McCanns ever appearing in court as accused parties are exactly those of their daughter being returned to them by an abductor – NIL. Otherwise they would be standing before the judge as accomplices to a deception perpetrated by the very government on whose behalf they were being prosecuted! Or are we also to believe that NORAD could be blind-sided, the Pentagon attacked, and some of Manhattan’s premier real estate flattened by a bunch of dissident Saudis squatting in an Afghan cave?

Martin Roberts

~

Ed: If after all these years you are still of the opinion that the Twin Towers were knocked down by a bunch of Arabs who couldn't even fly a Cessna, then I suggest you watch this.

If after watching it you are still of that opinion, then I suggest you hand in that part of your cerebral cortex that is redundant.

Miriam Hyman Collateral Damage?

Another extremely thoughtful and well argued piece from the inimitable Martin Roberts.

Miriam Hyman Collateral Damage?

By Dr Martin Roberts
19 August 2015


Death and the maiden

The story of Miriam Hyman’s death on the morning of Thursday July 7, 2005 is reminiscent of the John Ford movie ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’, insofar as the genuine executioner is not the one the audience are led to believe did the deed.

Miriam is understood to have been one of thirteen victims of the explosion aboard a no. 30 bus in London’s Tavistock square that occurred at 9.47 a.m. on the morning in question. Her parents realised she was missing and unaccounted for later that day and, in the course of their distress, proceeded to give interviews to the media, who reported as follows:

(John Hyman): "She certainly wasn't injured on the Underground because I spoke to her and at that time she was with a crowd of people evacuated from trains on the pavement outside King's Cross station. The only other possibility, apart from a road accident, is if she was on the bus that was blown up. The reason we think that is unlikely is because it wouldn't make sense for her to take that route. And I was speaking to her about that time and her office ‘phoned her at about 10 a.m., which was about 10 minutes after the explosion to say 'don't come in'. We think maybe she has gone into shock. Her mobile is off. She could have walked away from her handbag in shock. I think she's still in the Greater London area because when I checked yesterday afternoon her car was still in the local station car park." (The Independent, 10 July 2005).

The article continues:

"We would be gibbering wrecks if it weren't for those two ‘phone calls which give us a lot of hope.”

Likewise the International Herald Tribune (11 July 2005) reported:

‘John Hyman, whose 32-year-old daughter, Miriam, is missing, knows a few things for certain: She was not wounded when she left the Underground. She was not on the bus because the bus exploded at about the time he was on the ‘phone with her. Soon after, she called her workplace, and was told not to bother to come in. That was at 10 a.m., after the attacks, he said.

‘"I don't see how she could have got into the bus that exploded," he said. "And the route makes no sense, whether she's going to work or home." Her cellphone goes unanswered. Hyman's friends have papered the town with her image and raced to hospitals.’Miriam’s mother Mavis was quoted to similar effect by the Jewish Journal of 14 July:

‘Other Jewish families face an agonizing wait. Miriam Hyman, 32, a freelance photo editor, called her father, John, from King’s Cross Station at 9:45 a.m. Thursday to say she was all right. That was the last anyone has heard from her. After a fruitless search of London’s hospitals, “we are just waiting,” Hyman’s mother, Mavis, told JTA. ‘She ‘phoned work to say she was going to be late, she was still obviously determined to get in. I think she didn’t understand the seriousness of what was going on.’

‘Something Jewish’ picked up on corroboration given to the Sun Newspaper earlier by Miriam’s sister Esther. They (SJ) posted (11 July 2005):

‘Speaking to the Sun newspaper, her sister Esther said: "Something is stopping her answering the ‘phone or contacting us. It’s so scary because my dad spoke to her as soon as he heard about the bombs. She told him she was sitting on the pavement outside King’s Cross after her train had been evacuated at the station. We have heard nothing since and are frantic.”’

Matters arising

The first detail to bring attention to here is this observation on the part of John Hyman:
“The only other possibility, apart from a road accident, is if she was on the bus that was blown up. The reason we think that is unlikely is because it wouldn't make sense for her to take that route. And I was speaking to her about that time.”

Discounting any road accident (there were none involving pedestrian fatalities that day), Miriam was thought unlikely to have caught the doomed no. 30 bus anywhere near Euston Station for two reasons. First, her intended destination lay in the opposite direction, and second, she had only just concluded a ‘phone conversation with her father while outside King’s Cross (the bus had already left from Euston approximately half-a-mile away).

Things get more puzzling from here on in.

Esther Hyman: “It’s so scary because my dad spoke to her as soon as he heard about the bombs.”

Implying that Miriam’s anxious father rang to speak to her, as one might reasonably expect.

The Jewish Journal, however, would have it that: ‘Miriam Hyman, 32, a freelance photo editor, called her father, John, from King’s Cross Station at 9:45 a.m. Thursday to say she was all right. From her mother Mavis we learn “That was the last anyone has heard from her.”

Not, perhaps, a significant contradiction, but then there are others, which, given a common family origin for the story, are perplexing.

John Hyman (quoted in the Independent):

“And I was speaking to her about that time and her office ‘phoned her at about 10 a.m., which was about 10 minutes after the explosion to say 'don't come in.'”

Whereas the Herald Tribune’s report of Miriam’s conversation with her father proceeds:

‘soon after, she called her workplace, and was told not to bother to come in. That was at 10 a.m., after the attacks, he said.’

This was apparently echoed by Miriam’s mother in the Jewish Journal:

“Hyman’s mother, Mavis, told JTA.  

‘She ‘phoned work to say she was going to be late, she was still obviously determined to get in.”

Again, the directionality of the call might be considered of less importance than the fact of its occurrence. However, the one speaks to the other, metaphorically as well as literally, particularly in light of John Hyman’s remark:

"We would be gibbering wrecks if it weren't for those two ‘phone calls which give us a lot of hope.”

Irrespective of who dialled whom, once John Hyman’s conversation with his daughter was concluded and Miriam went on to speak to her colleague(s) at work (at 10.00 a.m. or thereabouts), how did either John or Mavis Hyman come to learn of that all-too-significant second call, given Esther’s statement that they had had no word of Miriam since the initial (9.45 a.m.) conversation (“She told him she was sitting on the pavement outside King’s Cross…..We have heard nothing since and are frantic.”’)?

‘“We are just waiting,” Hyman’s mother, Mavis, told JTA.’

That remark was published on 14 July, by which time, according to journalists Becky Barrow and Amy Iggulden (“Families receive the news that destroys all hope”), the Hymans had already been advised (13 July) of their daughter’s death (The Telegraph, 14 July 2005). In point of fact they knew by the 11th, as reported by the Jewish Chronicle Online (29.4.2010) and by Esther Hyman personally in an on-line video posted by the Guardian (6.5.2011) wherein she states: “So, we waited until the Monday and our family liaison officer came here and explained to my parents that ‘Mim’ had been identified by her dental records.”

All of which makes the appearance of Mavis Hyman’s ‘we are waiting‘ statement in the Jewish Journal afterwards rather difficult to understand.

The question as to how any of Miriam Hyman’s relatives could have been appraised of any subsequent cell ‘phone call of hers, whether to or from her place of work, remains unresolved however. It is a ‘phone call of the utmost significance, and not just because any such conversation at 10.00 a.m. that morning would rule Miriam out completely as having been a passenger aboard the devastated no. 30 bus.

In actual fact, the significance attaching to the ‘phone call between Miriam Hyman and her office does not reside in the ‘phone call per se, but in her work‘s location – Canary Wharf.

Trouble in the East-end 

Mid-morning on 7 July saw a solitary Radio Five broadcast recounting news of a shooting carried out by security services at Canary Wharf. The announcement was never repeated, although various news outlets worldwide carried the story.

Miriam Hyman has been accepted as dead since July 7, 2005. As far as her father was concerned, at least initially, “the only other possibility, apart from a road accident, is if she was on the bus that was blown up.“

There were only five fatal incidents in London that day – no reported suicides, no road traffic accidents of the ‘person in collision with a road vehicle’ variety; nothing except the four bombs detonated on London Transport and an unspecified shooting at Canary Wharf, Miriam Hyman’s declared destination.

The first three events can be discounted on the grounds that Miriam was safely evacuated from King’s Cross after they had occurred.

That leaves only two feasible explanations for Miriam’s death that Thursday:

Either she died aboard a bus which, according to her own father’s account, she could not have caught, or she was shot at Canary Wharf.

There are no other possibilities.

And now we may begin to appreciate the true significance of Miriam’s telephone dialogue(s) that morning.

The first, at 9.45 a.m., compromises the idea that she may have boarded the no. 30 bus. Rachael Bletchly of the Mirror (4 July, 2015) remains convinced however:

“Ten years ago on Tuesday, the 31-year-old picture researcher rang dad John to say that she had been evacuated from King’s Cross tube station in London and not to worry as she would get a bus to work.”

Given her declared determination to get to work, there was no reason, in principle, why she should not have done so eventually, at least in time to meet a lunchtime appointment she is also understood to have made. Nevertheless, since she has been declared dead as of the Thursday morning we know she could not have arrived, either at her office desk or for lunch.

Not only must we ask ourselves how the Hymans might have known about their daughter’s second crucial ‘phone call that morning (which did not involve either of them), but we should also question what purpose it may have served as far as they were concerned, given Miriam’s earlier personal assurance that she was safe and well.

The key detail of the alleged conversation is that Miriam was advised not to continue on to work (at Canary Wharf). The Hymans (and anyone else) might then reasonably suppose, at least initially, that if she didn’t arrive at her office that day it was because she had been told not to bother.

(This state of affairs is a dark and subtle reflection of the McCanns’ various references to their daughter’s en passant remarks, whereby they manage indirectly to suggest that she was alive when she made them).

Nick Kollerstrom (author of Terror on the Tube) has researched the events of 7/7 in considerable depth and posted the following comment on an internet forum discussing the case:

“From King’s Cross, one gets to Canary Wharf by bus travelling Eastbound, by taking the 30 bus half way then changing. There is no way you would walk back to Euston, which is in the opposite direction, to get the no. 30 bus, which by the way left Euston station before she rang her Father at 09.45 – when she said she was at King’s Cross. So, one must agree with what the Father was quoted as saying, about his daughter’s fate. When I spoke to him (today, a second time) he denied having said this, and said he had been misreported.

“Speaking to her father, on the ‘phone, he confirmed that she had rung him at 09.45, however he denied that she had rung her place of work at ten o’clock. He is convinced she was dead by then.”

That makes three people (John, Mavis and Esther Hyman) all separately misreported by at least three different media outlets.

So what, exactly, has John Hyman retracted? His doubts about Miriam’s having boarded the no. 30 bus, obviously, as well as his daughter’s conversation with colleague(s) at Canary Wharf, about which he couldn’t have known in the first place – except he did. That was prior to his acceptance of the ‘official line’, which then made the office ‘phone call story (as an explanation for Miriam’s non-arrival at work) redundant. The bus bomb was ultimately considered to have taken care of that.

One cannot but feel sympathy for any truly grieving parent, and I have no wish to impugn the Hyman family. However, in the light of what appear to be something other than trivial contradictions on their part, together with the lack of any categorical confirmation by them of exactly what they knew and when they knew it, there are genuine grounds for suspecting their daughter Miriam did not fall victim to a bomb at Tavistock Square, but to a bullet at Canary Wharf, and that her 10.00 a.m. ‘phone call to work was a ‘storyline’, fed to the Hymans, so as to defer further inquiry until such time as a more appropriate location for their daughter’s demise could be decided upon. Either that, or (heaven forfend) it was a storyline constructed by the Hymans.

Stereotypes

Nick Kollerstrom again:

‘On 10th July 2005 the Observer reported that “Police have put a tracking device on Miriam’s ‘phone so that if it is activated they will be able to find her.”‘

Whereabouts in relation to Miriam’s body was her ‘cell phone eventually found? It was clearly functional after the bombings that morning or the Police couldn’t have downloaded a tracker ‘app’ onto it; something there would scarcely have been any call for beforehand. The answer – it was never reported as having been found. That is not to say of course that it was never actually found.

Miriam’s mother Mavis is Indian, born in Kolkata. Miriam was therefore of mixed race (Jewish-Asian), and exhibited traits of each. Being an artist/picture editor, and based professionally at Canary Wharf, might she perhaps have been carrying a camera, a lap-top computer bag or portfolio case, and did these various characteristics conspire to appear suspicious when viewed through a telescopic gun-sight?

Answers to these several questions are provided by the Jewish Chronicle Online (29 April, 2010) in commenting upon the belated inquest into the many deaths, five years previously, on 7/7. Albeit lengthy, the following passage from the Jewish Chronicle is richly informative:

“The family of Miriam Hyman, who died in the 7/7 terror attack, was forced to wait four days to be officially told of her death, even though identification documents were found on her body.

“In the High Court this week, lawyers acting for the Hyman family and that of Israeli Anat Rosenberg, who was also killed by the Tavistock Square bus bomb in July 2005, urged the coroner to resume the inquests and investigate whether the security services failed to act upon information known about the bombers before the attack.

“The hearing heard that many families had suffered long delays in being informed of the deaths. One had to wait 11 days.

“Counsel Janine Sheff told the court that relatives of Ms Hyman, a 32-year-old picture researcher from Hampstead Garden Suburb, had to wait "four agonising days" to be told she was among the 52 victims.

“Ms Sheff said: "She was found with her bag strapped to her, with numerous documents with her ID on her."

“She added that the parents of Ms Hyman were unable to travel to London and search hospitals, instead relying on her friends, who were told the police had no information.

“Ms Sheff said: "So troubled were they from the lack of information from the police - who said they had to live with that lack of knowledge - that they sought a [bomb] survivor to help them understand what happened."

“Ms Hyman's mother, Mavis, said: "Those four days of no news were unquestionably the most horrendous of my life. Nobody had any suggestion as to what had happened. Her family and friends couldn't just sit still and we spoke to the media and survivors to try to get any information we could.

"The police were not helpful and gave us little information. We would have appreciated knowing about the identification found."

Indeed.

Note how "She was found with her bag strapped to her, with numerous documents with her ID on her."

Whether taken in or out of context, this is an altogether extraordinary turn of phrase, no doubt originating with the person(s) who actually ‘found’ Miriam in the first place.

Miriam is not described as having ‘a bag over her shoulder’ nor, however unlikely, ‘wearing a rucksack or back-pack.’ Instead her bag is ‘strapped to her’, conjuring up images elsewhere of an explosive waistcoat. To which we are invited to add ‘numerous documents with her ID.’ Well it was London, so I suppose even a pedestrian might be expected carry one or two means of identification – but numerous examples?

All we have to do here is bring forward the conventional wisdom of the day (that suicide bombers were wont to deposit evidence of their identity at the scene of their martydom, as Mohammed Sidique Khan is posthumously accused of having done at two locations on the London Underground, despite being credited with only one bomb) and we have the Blair government blueprint for a long-haired, dark-skinned terrorist.

And yet there was no mobile ‘phone, nor any information of immediate interest to the parents for four whole days?

Miriam may well have been found with ‘her bag strapped to her body,’ but where exactly was her body at the time?

It gets murkier.


Distortions in Space-Time

This from Esther Addley of the Guardian (6.5.2011):

“At around 9.45am one sunny morning in July 2005, John Hyman took a call from his daughter Miriam. There had been some sort of problem at King's Cross, she said, and she had been evacuated from the tube. She was fine, though, and he wasn't to worry. Her father suggested she find a coffee shop and wait until things calmed down.

“In the hours and days that followed the terrorist attacks on London, the Hyman family clung to that phone call like a lifebuoy, desperately telling themselves the call had come after 9.49am, the moment when 18-year-old Hasib Hussain blew himself up on the upper deck of a number 30 bus to Hackney.

“Four days later, after touring the capital's hospitals, putting up posters and making appeals via the media, they were at last told by a police family liaison officer that Miriam had been identified by her dental records. She had been sitting directly in front of Hussain at the moment of explosion, and was blown from the bus and on to the pavement, where she died very shortly afterwards.”

We ought here to interpolate another statement by Esther Hyman, again recorded within the Guardian video of the same date, which specifies even more precisely the location of Miriam’s corpse, an observation shortly to assume particular significance:

“She was thrown from the bus onto the pavement directly outside the entrance of the BMA building.”

Notice how this Guardian article allocates Miriam two additional minutes in which to catch the no. 30 bus, how the police somehow knew whose dental records to track down (presumably from the ID they were decidedly reluctant to reveal to the parents), and exactly where this lady was sitting in relation to other passengers on board the bus. (Reported at the inquest to have had an inboard seat, she is nevertheless catapulted onto the nearside pavement).

It doesn’t end there. The Guardian continues:

“The Hyman family made an even more striking discovery. They had been contacted, two years after the bombings, by Clive Featherstone, who had been working in Tavistock Square when the bomb went off, and who had held Miriam's hand in her final moments. "At first we didn't get back in touch with him … [But] since then we've become very close with him."

“It was only during the inquest process that they discovered the existence of another man, a passer-by called Richard Collins, who had gone to Miriam's side after Featherstone had been told to move along by a policeman. Initially they thought he must have been mistaken and confused Miriam with another victim, but no. "Richard told us afterwards: 'I would have felt a bit silly if it had turned out not to be Miriam, as I actually had her initials tattooed on my chest.' It's his only tattoo but it turned out that he had been so moved that he had this indelible mark put on himself. We find that exceptional."*

The Hymans thought at first that Richard Collins had been mistaken, yet he had sufficient confidence in his identification of their daughter as to have her initials tattooed on his chest afterwards. Thus confirmation of Miriam Hyman’s last moments becomes a pre-requisite for validation of Collins’ tattoo! We are not told the basis for Clive Featherstone’s identification of her.

Featherstone and Collins’ displayed their separate acts of sympathy toward the same young lady, whom counsel at the inquest would make every effort to identify as Miriam Hyman. There were however several dark-skinned female victims aboard the no. 30 bus, two of whom are known to have taken their last breaths at the roadside. Neetu Jain was 37 years old and originally from Delhi. Gladys Wundowa was black. Both are said to have been occupying nearside window seats.

In March 2006 Michelle Du-Feu, a doctor, described having treated a middle-aged Middle-Eastern or Asian-looking woman lying on the road at the rear of the bus. At the Inquest in January 2011 she said that when shown a photograph of Miriam Hyman a year earlier she had become confused, “because things obviously weren’t how I had remembered them.“

Despite attempts by lead counsel Hugo Keith to get Dr Du-Feu to admit she had treated Miriam Hyman, she did not do so. Ms. Gallagher, counsel for the Hyman family acknowledged that Dr. Du-Feu was thus “not so sure” to have treated and seen Miriam.

A Dr Michael David Peters, who was also invited to testify at the Inquest, said that when he came out from the BMA building he saw a torso:

“There was a sort of mass of sort of tissue, red, about one metre by a metre there. And then, on the other side, to the left as I was looking from the square in, there was a body of, I think, a black woman who was wearing a dress. The body seemed to be swollen, motionless, and I presumed she was dead.“ 

Although Hugo Keith once again tried to convince Dr. Peters that he may actually have seen Miriam Hyman, Peters insisted the woman he saw was black.

Hence two critically injured females were immediately attended in the road (or on the pavement), one of them Asian. Yet neither was identifiable as Miriam Hyman. According to ‘the Mirror’ (20.1.2011) Clive Featherstone described at the Inquest how Miriam “kind of moved to try and lift herself up or towards me” as he knelt beside her. However, the first thing Dr Peters noticed on exiting the BMA building was a torso. If this were Miriam’s body, which, according to her sister Esther, had landed in that very entrance, then she would have been killed instantaneously and there could have been no attempted movement whatsoever.

When asked about an earlier statement he had made concerning the absence of Miriam’s left leg, Richard Collins replied:

”From the knee down, halfway across the knee down”. Loss of the lower half of one lower limb does not represent a ‘torso’.

Unless, therefore, an additional female body is known to have been lying in the immediate vicinity, then there are few grounds for believing Miriam was ever there, especially given the death also of Shahara Islam, another Asian female on board the no. 30 bus, positioned originally, it is supposed, among the group of seats directly across the aisle from the exploding bomb.


The eyes have it

Bearing in mind that Featherstone and Collins each claimed to have comforted the same individual, it is worth recording their respective observations regarding her facial appearance, especially as they were complete strangers to each other.

First Featherstone:

“I noticed that she had these little polystyrene balls in her eyes, which apparently later I heard was from the padding of the seats.”

And now Collins:

“Looking at my witness statement, I recalled that her eyes were green, if that is the case. So obviously, I was looking in her eyes, but I don't recall any polystyrene balls.”

Miriam Hyman’s eyes were unquestionably hazel brown, as one might expect of a lady of Asian extraction. Extraordinarily however, the eyes of 20 year old Shahara Islam, herself a victim from the rear of the upper deck, were considerably paler, and might easily have been taken for green. (See: HuffPo (Or below Ed)

Both Featherstone and Collins comforted the same badly injured, green-eyed lady, not an incomplete corpse. That lady was clearly not Miriam Hyman, and Richard Collins’ subsequent tattoo does not make it so. The inquest account of the state in which Miriam was found does not include mention of where, nor does it lead one to suppose that her body was other than intact, despite Esther Hyman’s announcement of her sister’s last known whereabouts in death, and what that would necessarily imply.

As http://aldeilis.net/bpb/london/ further informs us:

“According to the Daily Star, inquests were opened on 13 July 2005 into the deaths of Miriam Hyman and others. No family members, however, were invited to attend the hearing which was held at St Pancras coroner’s court. It has not been explained why no family members were invited to attend. Dr. Reid then adjourned the inquests until after the end of police investigations.“

Miriam Hyman is said, conventionally almost, to have died aboard a no. 30 bus, in a misguided attempt to reach her place of work at Canary Wharf. Her name is after all included on a wall plaque placed in memory of the Tavistock Square victims. It is a bus she could not have caught, unless of course one subscribes to the Times Group account of 28 December 2005, which renders the father‘s contention false from start to finish:

“Miriam Hyman, 32, a freelance picture researcher was travelling to work, but was told by her agency not to bother coming in. Amid the chaos, she was evacuated from the Tube train she was travelling on at King's Cross. She walked to Tavistock Square, from where she rang her parents to let them know she was alright. She then alighted the doomed number 30 bus.”

John Hyman’s story is indeed questionable, especially the part where he describes a later ‘phone call he could have known nothing about unless informed of it by someone else. Miriam could have walked to Tavistock Square, where, according to the Times, she actually got off the ‘doomed no. 30’ bus, rather than on it.

Such verbal carelessness however hardly inspires confidence in the content of the report, or the belief that John Hyman’s own twice confirmed account was significantly incorrect.

That being the case there is only one place Miriam Hyman could have died that morning, and it would not have been as the result of any random act of terrorism.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has publicly lamented the deaths of British soldiers sent to fight in Iraq, as well as the many hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children, who also perished as a direct result of the West’s unprovoked ‘War on Terror‘. It is tempting to speculate that his dogmatic refusal to authorize a public inquiry into the London bombings of 7/7 stemmed, at least in part, from his being unprepared to countenance the revelation of an innocent British citizen, a Londoner, being shot dead on the streets of their own capital, and by a member of their own security services. The state-sanctioned murder of Jean Charles de Menezes a fortnight later proved difficult enough to handle - and he wasn’t even British.

Dr Martin Roberts

Blair attends 7/7 memorial, full of contrition no doubt.

* Not as much as I find it unbelievable. Ed