Kate: I’ll have my day in court
Maddie’s mother asks to speak at libel hearing
KATE McCann has vowed to defend herself in court for the first time against claims that she faked the abduction of her missing daughter Madeleine.
She has asked a judge for permission to address a libel trial sparked by a controversial book penned by the ex-police chief tasked with i nvestigating t he 2007 disappearance.
Goncalo Amaral, author of The Truth of the Lie, has accused the McCanns of faking the abduction to cover up Madeleine’s death i n their Portuguese holiday apartment.
Amaral has also applied to speak in court.
Mrs McCann’s application, revealed yesterday, paves the way for an emotion- charged finale to the £1million case.
It comes just days ahead of a new appeal by the McCanns to be aired on the BBC’s Crimewatch on Monday, which will feature a reconstruction of events in Praia da Luz in the Algarve, on May 3, 2007.
It i s thought Madeleine’s Glasgow-born father Gerry will join his wife in the TV appeal. Mrs McCann flew to Portugal for the start of the libel trial last month. Judge Maria Emilia Melo e Castro, referring to the 45- year- old by her maiden name, said: ‘On October 2, Kate Healy made an application to make a statement in court.
‘The court will decide on this application once evidence has been heard by both sides as only then will it be able to judge on the need for and the pertinence of this application.’
If given the go-ahead, the McCanns and Amaral are expected to speak on the same day, on or after November 27, when the last hearing in the trial at Lisbon’s Palace of Justice is scheduled.
Former colleagues of Mr Amaral yesterday insisted in court that nothing he wrote in his July 2008 book was new.
The book was published three days after the McCanns had their status as ‘arguidos’ or suspects over Madeleine’s disappearance officially lifted.
About 120,000 copies were sold before it was withdrawn when the McCanns won an injunction against its author.
Portuguese TV station TVI, also being sued by the McCanns
‘Prophetic and dogmatic’
along with Amaral’s publisher, broadcast a documentary based on the book in April 2009.
Former police family liaison officer Ricardo Paiva told the court: ‘What is in the book is based on our investigation and contains the professional and personal opinions of Goncalo Amaral as a police officer.
‘Everything that is there can be found in the case files.’
Contradicting earlier claims by the McCanns that Amaral’s book had hindered their search for their daughter by turning the Portuguese public against them, he added: ‘The flow of information continued to come in regularly. Neither this book or any other book affected the flow of information.’
Luis Neves, head of a leading national police unit, said Mr Amaral’s conclusion t hat Madeleine was dead was also accepted early on by her parents, but they increasingly came to believe it was an abduction.
Ex-police officer Francisco Moita Flores described the hunt for Madeleine as one of the ‘most complex and well-investigated cases’ he had seen and called Amaral ‘competent’.
He insisted the Tapas Nine – the McCanns and the friends dining with them at a tapas bar near their apartment on the night Madeleine disappeared – should have had their phones tapped because of ‘inconsistencies’ in their statements.
Attacking the on-going Home Office- funded investigation, called Operation Grange, he told the court: ‘ There’s a prophetic and dogmatic vision behind it. These detectives are only putting forward the hypothesis of abduction.’
Amaral, 56, denies defamation.
The case continues on November 5.