http://www.buzzle.com/articles/210755.html
On Monday, Mr and Mrs McCann were formally cleared of any involvement in Madeleine's disappearance, after the Portuguese attorney general, having reviewed the entire police investigation, ruled that there was
no evidence to suggest that they, or Robert Murat, the local businessman also named a suspect, had committed any crime.
It should provide some small measure of justice and relief to what
any fair-minded person must now conclude are a grotesquely maligned couple.
The investigators, in truth, were at fault from the very beginning. Journalists, police officers and other experts who witnessed the early stages of the investigation were struck by how out of their depth the police seemed. Their failure to secure the crime scene, close the borders, take early witness statements and conform to other basic investigative good practice has been well reported.
The most senior police officer, Goncalo Amaral, was abruptly removed from the case and demoted over his handling of it, while
his office spent last summer leaking extremely prejudicial material about the McCanns to local media.
(Amaral is currently facing perjury charges, which he denies, in relation to another missing child case, which might cast doubt on the credibility of his own tell-all book
But there is no question that Kate and Gerry McCann were horribly failed by the investigation into Madeleine's disappearance.
A few voices in Portugal are now willing to acknowledge as much. "Since the earliest days," Miguel Sousa Tavares wrote in the daily Expresso this week.
"I had the impression that the PJ did not have the slightest thought-through strategy ....
the PJ didn't know what to do. Their old, lazy methods hadn't worked and it didn't know any other ones."
But as the McCanns' own investigators begin trawling through the police files - and who can now criticize them for appointing their own detectives? - in an attempt to rekindle long cold leads, it is not only the Portuguese police who should feel chastened this week.
Several newspapers and broadcasters simply suspended their own sense of natural justice and any legal caution to publish whatever they liked -
much of it unsourced and the worst of it
entirely libellous. (The McCanns won £550,000 in a libel settlement from one newspaper group but could have pursued many others if they had been so minded.)
And so, for the record, this is where we stand on the supposed evidence against Kate and Gerry McCann.
There was never any DNA "proof" that Madeleine's body had been in the couple's hire car -
forensics experts have always argued for caution in interpreting sniffer dogs' reactions.
An American court case ruled this kind of evidence inadmissable last year after finding that
three supposedly "specialist" dogs were incorrect between 62% and 78% of the time.
Whatever became of the presumption of innocence?
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Excellent article. :clap::clap:
WHAT ABOUT MADELEINE? :furious: or is it that for them it was never about her! :furious:
the McCanns are guilty are clearly not concerned that this witch hunt..."there is no evidence that Madeleine is dead" has all but destroyed the search for her. 
