."The little girl died in that apartment" - Gonçalo Amaral on TVIThis is the transcript of an interview with Gonçalo Amaral, Paulo Reis and Duarte Levy, by Júlia Pinheiro, on 'As Tardes da Júlia', TVI, broadcast live on or around the 28th of July 2008.
JP: Do you really reach the theory of an accidental death according to your theory, before the dogs arrive in Portugal, or…
GA: Yes, before the dogs come to Portugal, there are signs of death as I say in the book, signs which are given by the family that a cadaver is being searched. This gentleman comes from South Africa, and hair from the little girl, supposedly from the little girl, he places it inside a machine which he invented and we hear its contents which says that there within a certain area of the beach lies a cadaver. So he came on the couple’s request, otherwise he would not be requested. Then, the dogs’ intervention follows a work of analysis, of planning carried out by a British national consultant, from the British police, he was here in Portugal, he saw the area, he consulted the process with what happened, therefore with facts that existed, he went to the area, he rode a helicopter, consulted with academics, and all that and he reached the conclusion that we have to search for a cadaver. In order to search for a cadaver these experts have to be used, these dogs and that was what happened. So from there on…
JP: So that was what is called a good relationship between British and Portuguese investigators.
GA: Very good.
JP: Very good. Contrary to everything that was later reported by the press.
GA: Exactly.
JP: So your opinion is that an accidental death took place in that apartment.
GA: It is not my opinion. It’s the opinion of the investigation. This has to be made very clear. I have repeated this several times but it’s important.
JP: You are absolutely right, so according to the investigation…
GA: According to the investigation that was composed of English, Portuguese investigators…
JP: Exactly. The little girl died in that apartment?
GA: The little girl died in that apartment.
JP: On the evening of the 3rd of May.
GA: And we reached that conclusion with the data that we have.
JP: And before the time that was announced? Before 10 pm which is the time that was…
GA: The time is not known because the reconstitution was not carried out, which could be important in order to define the times and to verify if they could have attended all that vigilance from the parents, every 10 or every 5 minutes, so if they were having dinner and all of a sudden almost nobody dined, isn’t it. But it seems that only one plate went back, a steak that had to be warmed up. It was necessary to understand who it was that failed to eat that steak and what everyone else ate, how long the dinner lasted, how long the meals take to be confectioned, and all of those things in order to understand it all afterwards.
The reconstitution was not carried out and from there on it’s difficult to know at what time it could have happened. There is one piece of data in terms of accurate time that evening, it exists and it concerns the little girl, it’s the time at which she left the nursery.
JP: At 5.30 pm.
GA: At 5.30 pm, concerning the other witnesses that were at the beach there is the video registry, they were filmed by the camera that was there, at 6.36 pm they leave the beach, first the men and afterwards the women and children, in terms of times and then there is the time of the Irish witness who knows at what time his dinner ends, and he has the receipt of the payment with the time at which he paid, when he leaves the restaurant across the street –
JP: Across the street he sees a man walking down with a child…
GA: He sees a man walking down with a child.
JP: … who he only realizes to be Gerry McCann when he sees Gerry McCann descending with his children…
GA: Exactly.
JP: … when they return to England.
GA: The files that mention the testimony, they mention the clumsy manner in which he carried the child, the posture which we could call athletic, that he was an athletic individual and they offer a description, they reach the point of saying that, it was maybe possible in terms of saying who it is physically, but with those characteristics, the manner in which he walked, how he carried the child, they could know who it was. And so when he sees, when that family sees Gerry McCann descending from the airplane carrying the child and he starts to walk on the pavement, they realized. Now he says it’s 80%, if you tell me ah that is not evidence, I also agree it’s not evidence but at least it’s a piece of information and that information should always be worked out.
JP: And was it?
GA: When I left Portimão, on the 1st of October, I left on the 2nd but on the 1st we were arranging for those witnesses to come to Portugal. We already had permission from the national director, all that was left to do was to choose a hotel for them to stay and to schedule a date. After I left I know it took several months until the witness was heard, which happened around January or February this year, I don’t know, through a rogatory letter or a request for assistance under international cooperation.
JP: That is really one of the surprising bits of data. Another piece of data which is also surprising is related to that towel that Kate McCann gives for the first dogs, our dogs, the Portuguese. Why did she give a towel and not a piece of clothing? After this I’ll let Paulo speak.
GA: That is another question that has to be understood as well, doesn’t it? The towel because supposedly she had had a bath that day, right? It would therefore carry more of the little girl’s smell, the little girl’s odour, so this was an option between her, I think, and the members of GNR.
JP: The GNR which was there. Let’s hear Paulo.
PR: Now before I move on to another question, concerning the towel has the PJ established for example how often the bed sheets and the towels in the apartments are changed. Because if memory doesn’t fail me, the towel is delivered to the GNR 48 hours after the little girl disappeared.
GA: No. The towel was handed over right on that night.
PR: On that night.
GA: The GNR dogs also arrived that night. But the last time that the apartment had been cleaned was on Wednesday.
PR: A while ago, you mentioned an English policeman, a great expert, I suppose you were referring to Mark Harrison who is one of the two or three best British policemen in terms of investigating complex crimes. He was here, he spent a week in Praia da Luz, he rummaged through Praia da Luz, he walked everywhere, the saw the process upside down, he read the entire process, and then he wrote a report in which he concludes that the most likely hypothesis is the child’s death, and if I’m correct, he proposes the dogs’ coming, right?
GA: Exactly.
PR: Was he the policeman who also retired, a reference that you made during a press conference? That there was an English policeman who retired.
GA: No.
PR: Was there an English policeman who also retired?
GA: The English policeman who retired is from the Leicester police. Now the reasons I would prefer not to talk about him at the moment. As a matter of fact I’d like to talk to him personally and I don’t want him to be pressured so I would reserve myself the right not to comment any further.
PR: Just to make this very clear, is that English policeman, Mark Harrison…
GA: No, no, no.
PR: … who comes here, writes a report, no, I’m not talking about the retirement issue, I’m just saying that he came here, that he is an expert in complex crime, one of the most prestigious from the English police, he walks the streets of Praia da Luz from one end to another, he measures, routes, timings, he analyses the process and after that he writes a report in his quality as one of the finest English experts, where he writes black on white that the most likely possibility is that the child died in the apartment, is that correct?
GA: Correct.
PR: That is what marks the turn in the investigations.
GA: Correct.
PR: And then the famous dogs arrive…
GA: Yes, to detect cadaver and human blood odour.
JP: So you don’t want to tell why your colleague retired. He has his own reasons. But you are aware that all of this thickens the public’s perception of a Machiavellian conspiracy theory. I understand your position, maybe at the moment you don’t want to say more or you can’t, it’s a fact that your book has brought us something more but we still fail to understand everything. Mainly, possibly the macro-structure that surrounds all of this. Duarte?
DL: No, I just wanted to talk about the issue of the English lab’s reports.
JP: That is very important, yes.
GA: The reports from the English labs… the English reports arrive shortly before the questionings that were scheduled. And it contained certain conclusions, if they thought they were inconclusive they shouldn’t have mentioned it, the question of the 15 alleles in a profile of 19 from the little girl, stating that they match Madeleine McCann, but they also say that it could have been a construction let’s say from various donors, from other persons, a contamination could have produced Madeleine McCann’s profile by coincidence. But there are no excuses for saying that it is not from Madeleine McCann because they held the profiles of the father, the mother, the siblings, therefore there are no doubts that at least within that family they only matched Madeleine McCann’s.
DL: In Portugal, for example, we only need a match of 15 alleles out of 19 in order to determine someone’s paternity, therefore… That is the first fact. The second fact is that at this moment, the institute for Forensic Medicine is already prepared, they already own the same equipment as the FSS in England to carry out this type of analysis. Why does the Public Ministry or the PolÃcia Judiciária not request, or don’t they have any more samples to carry out…
GA: As far as we know, they have all been destroyed by now, namely the hair. Nothing can be done.
PR: Concerning the FSS reports –
GA: And the samples were microscopic, weren’t they…
PR: Are you absolutely certain that the reports that reached you, namely those concerning the blood residues in the car boot, are exactly the reports that left the FSS?
GA: I have no doubts whatsoever, in fact, they were delivered by a senior official from Leicester police, it carries a logo, they came and went by email, so there is an existing origin, therefore the report is signed, so I have no doubts about that.
JP: You have no doubts whatsoever about that.
GA: On the official document.
JP: But wasn’t it published in Belgium that…
DL: … that there are two reports. There is one report that left the FSS and there is a second slightly different report that arrived in Portugal.
GA: There is a recent report and there are two other reports. The first one mentions 15 alleles and here is the main question, it places the focus, they place the focus on that part of the exam from the vehicle, in the second [report] they then focus on the apartment, if on one side 15 alleles were not enough, in the other there were only 5 alleles that matched Madeleine McCann’s genetic profile, what could be read there was that there were almost no problems. Because it’s easily justifiable. It may not be justifiable with the cadaver odour on the spot where the blood sample was collected, but therefore, inside the house it is easy to justify, it’s more difficult with a car that was rented more than twenty days later. So this is where the major confusion lies.
JP: Yes, Paulo?
PR: At a given moment in time, around the 9th or 10th of May, starts what you mention in your book, a wave of sightings of Madeleine. Madeleine is first seen in Morocco, by a…
GA: First she is seen here in Portugal. The wave starts to spread in Portugal.
PR: Exactly. Portugal and then –
GA: Then she is seen in the North, then jumps to South America, Brazil…
PR: One that was largely publicised by the English newspapers, was from a Norwegian lady who was spending holidays in Morocco and who swears that she saw the little girl. What the English press does not mention at that time is that the lady is Norwegian but she is married to a man who was born and bred in Rothley, the town where the…
JP: It could be a tremendous coincidence.
PR: … the McCanns resided for the last few years. This is the question that I ask you: The wave of sightings, namely in Morocco, where witnesses state that they are 100% certain that it was the child, I have no doubts. Beyond the usual confirmation with Interpol, Interpol and the police forces in those countries were requested to investigate those sightings and those witnesses.
GA: The witnesses, it was necessary to hear those witnesses and she lives in Southern Spain. She lives near Valencia. That is one of the diligences that possibly remained to carry out. But concerning those sightings in Morocco, it was through the cooperation with the English police, with liaison officers with the Moroccan police that tried to obtain the video tapes from that petrol station where the little girl was seen, in order to try to find out if it could actually be her or not. It was all handled from there.
JP: And you don’t value the fact that really the lady who saw is married to someone who coincidentally is…
GA: That was actually taken into account and it happened later, as Paulo Reis said, and as a matter of fact it’s something that should have been worked upon in terms of being heard.
JP: Well, let’s talk about what worries…
GA: But I can also say that apart from those sightings all over the world, in Praia da Luz there were little girls that strongly resembled Madeleine, blond with blue eyes, many of the same age as her. Therefore, someone could have spotted Madeleine there, in Praia da Luz, something that was not done.
JP: That’s true, that’s true. In your opinion, Maddie, in the opinion of the investigation and of your colleagues and the team that you coordinated, did Maddie die that evening?
GA: She died.
JP: And someone took her from that apartment and placed her where?
GA: Look, when we are in an investigation of this kind we have to understand what the knowledge of those persons is, if they know other people, what contacts they have. If they have means at their disposal. We have to know the area itself, to know about the facility or the almost material impossibility to conceal the corpse within few hours and few minutes. And the conclusion that we reach with all of this, with all of this data is that, if there was any involvement from those nine persons, the corpse could only be in the beach area. And that is in fact where the gentleman…
JP: The investigator.
GA: Not the investigator, the Irish witnesses…
JP: Ah yes!
GA: … see a person passing, a man carrying a child, a little girl, they say that it is in effect Madeleine going towards the South area, let’s put it that way, towards the sea side. Now whether or not she stayed there, that is another question. For how long she stayed there, what happens next, only the development of the investigation of that area of death, let’s put it that way, could take us there.
JP: Would you have followed that investigation line?
GA: It was the direction that I was following at that time so until we emptied it we weren’t stopping, were we…
JP: It sounds so unbelievable, the possibility that a body was placed on a cliff, or in any other area on the beach, and then removed and transported in a rental car.
GA: The corpse couldn’t have remained there all the time. It’s impossible.
JP: So where was it taken next?
GA: If we take into account that, if we consider the traces that were found in the car boot…
JP: … which are in fact…
GA: … which are in fact from the little girl. In order to justify that bodily fluid as the lab says, it could only have been preserved and conserved in the cold because otherwise it would have been…
JP: That means that…
GA: … in an advanced state of decomposition, at least it’s a hypothesis. Therefore it’s a question of a deep freezer, or something similar, and there we had to search for it and that was what we were doing. This means, the contacts that they had, where they went, where they were seen… There are people who say that they were seen entering an apartment block near the cemetery in Praia da Luz. At that point in time we weren’t able to detect which apartment they entered, who lived there, because it’s also a bit complicated because you have to understand it’s a tourist area and often it’s not known who the apartment belongs to.
JP: Of course, of course…
GA: Who lives there, for how long they live there, so all of that was being worked upon. To try to understand the support…
JP: If someone discovered a deep freezer in the area and…
GA: If it was actually a deep freezer, it doesn’t exist anymore now.
JP: Is that still possible to find out? I imagine…
GA: Look, a few years ago on the Azores, after a homicide that had taken place years earlier, we managed to locate a vehicle that was already in a junk yard in which a taxi driver had been killed, a taxi driver from Praia da Vitória in the Azores. But we were unlucky, normally the van’s back had a carpet but it didn’t exist anymore. That carpet didn’t exist anymore, so if we had found that carpet it would have been possible to prove that the death had taken place there, so anything is possible.
JP: Anything is possible. I don’t know if Paulo and Duarte have any further questions, you have to be brief, we’re almost finishing.
DL: One more doubt, I read in your book that you never received the medical report, Madeleine’s clinical history. For example I also know that –
GA: We think, because that’s the way it is, we spoke to the English police, they said right away that there were problems in England to hand that over within the rogatory letter’s context. There is a rogatory letter that was carried out but before that there was another rogatory letter that was being prepared which also contained those questions and which also contained questions about other tests, other tests by the dogs with the friends that were there, namely on the clothes with those same dogs in order to try to find cadaver odour or any other trace, that was important. So there was that rogatory letter…
DL: And you never received those reports, you receive the reply that the McCanns had no credit cards, you already knew that was false, could it then be said that there were two English teams working on this case? The one that in fact stood beside the PJ and the one that worked against…
GA: I don’t speak with the English police, I can assure you…
JP: And now we don’t speak at all because we’re arriving at the end. I only want, Gonçalo Amaral, I only want to know one thing. Will Maddie return to your life one of these days, or not?
GA: I think yes. This book has the will of clarifying and of contributing to the investigation, I think yes, there are more things to talk about.
JP: Is that your mission?
GA: It’s not a mission, it’s a question of recovering my dignity and my honour and that of my colleagues and of this institution to which I was so proud of belonging to for so many years, and of justice being done for the little girl.
JP: Thank you. A round of applause for Gonçalo Amaral. Duarte Levy and Paulo Reis, thank you very much.
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