SA man faces charge in Maddie saga

AS BRITISH police this week arrived in Portugal to dig for clues linked to missing toddler Madeleine McCann, a Cape Town property developer who is fixated with the case has been told he is facing possible criminal charges after sneaking into the property where he believes Maddie’s body is buried.

Stephen Birch, 49, made international headlines two years ago for claiming he had located the child’s body using a groundpenetrating radar machine.

He believes the body is buried 600mm under a driveway on the property of Jenifer Murat. She lives about 150m from where the McCann family stayed while on holiday in Praia da Luz, the holiday resort in Portugal where three-year-old Maddie went missing seven years ago. The police will reportedly do excavations in the resort, metres away from Murat’s driveway.

This week, Portuguese prosecutors notified Birch that Murat had laid a charge of trespassing against him.

Murat’s son, Robert — who was staying with his mother at the time of Maddie’s disappearance — was initially a suspect in the case, but he was cleared.

It is unclear why the com- plaint was laid almost two years after Birch sneaked into the property. It is the latest in a string of legal actions by the Murat family against media following alleged libel in connection with the case.

Birch says he has spent more than R1-million on his own probe into Maddie’s disappearance, gathered roughly 10 000 pages of police records and scoured “all the evidence”.

The self-styled investigator believes the latest legal action against him is part of a broader plot to cover up what happened to Maddie.

In mid-2012, Birch travelled to Praia da Luz. He admitted to trespassing on Murat’s property five times — climbing over a AMATEUR HUNCH: The driveway of the house in Praia da Luz where Capetonian Stephen Birch believes the body of Maddie McCann lies buried fence and lugging the 26kg radar machine with him, then spending about 50 minutes scanning the ground when the wind was blowing in a certain direction in an effort not to alert Murat’s four dogs — and said he would pay a fine if necessary.

Birch, who has thousands of Facebook followers, believes Maddie died by accident after falling over the couch and breaking her neck in the apartment where her family had been staying, but cannot give any evidence to support this theory.

“Despite my findings receiving worldwide coverage and me appearing 18 times in Portugal’s largest newspaper, Correio de Manha, the Portuguese authorities refused to excavate the drive- way,” he said. He believes “the small gravel driveway, which serves no purpose, was constructed over the body of Madeleine, possibly to prevent Murat’s dogs from digging up the body”.

Birch said he got the idea to use the radar machine from a friend who worked in the construction industry, and honed his skill on the machine in a graveyard near Paarl.

Murat’s lawyer, Francisco Pagarete, said this week that the complaint against Birch had been made to a prosecutor who decided to proceed.

“What’s going to happen to Birch — a trial, arrested or a fine? I don’t know yet,” he said.

Detectives prepared to use ground-penetrating radar equipment this week to examine three sites in Praia da Luz.

It is understood that two areas of land near the apartment where Maddie was last seen and a nearby beach will be dug up.

Forensic officers will examine sites where the earth has been disturbed over the past 10 years before moving in with mechanical diggers and then conducting a fingertip search.

The operation is understood to come from intelligence gathered over the past seven years that indicates there could be new evidence at certain locations.