Maddie’s parents are not officially in clear, says court
THE parents of Madeleine McCann faced fresh heartache yesterday after Portugal’s highest court stressed that they had not been cleared over her disappearance a decade ago.
The Supreme Court said removing Kate and Gerry McCann’s ‘arguido’ – or formal suspect – status in 2008 should not be equated to proof of innocence.
Judges said the investigation into Maddie’s disappearance was only shelved because of a lack of evidence and serious concerns remained over the theory that she was abducted.
Maddie, who is still missing, was days away from her fourth birthday when she vanished from the family’s rented holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Algarve, in May 2007.
The judges’ intervention came in the publication of their 76-page ruling on the McCanns’ unsuccessful fight against a lower court’s decision to reverse their 2015 libel win against former detective Goncalo Amaral.
The McCanns, both 48, from Rothley, Leicestershire, had been fighting Amaral’s claim in a book that the couple covered up their daughter’s death at the apartment by claiming she had been abducted.
The former Algarve police chief who led the hunt for Maddie in 2007 was ordered to pay £394,000 after losing a libel case two years ago. That ruling was overturned by an appeal court last April, a verdict the Supreme Court upheld last week.
The McCanns, who were dining with friends in a restaurant yards from the apartment when Maddie disappeared, have always claimed to be innocent of any wrongdoing.
The judges said it was not for them to decide if the McCanns bore any criminal responsibility over their daughter’s disappearance and it would be wrong for anyone to draw any inferences about the couple’s guilt or innocence from their ruling. They added: ‘The archiving of the case was determined by the fact that public prosecutors hadn’t managed to obtain sufficient evidence of the practice of crimes by the appellants.
‘It doesn’t therefore seem acceptable that the ruling, based on the insufficiency of evidence, should be equated to proof of innocence.’
Kate and Glasgow-born Gerry were told their ‘arguido’ status had been lifted in July 2008 when the Portuguese probe into Maddie’s disappearance was shelved, three days before Amaral published his controversial book The Truth Of The Lie. The Supreme Court said it had to resolve the rights of the McCanns to their good name, and the constitutional right of Amaral and his editors to freedom of expression.
They concluded that the book was not an unjustified attack on the McCanns with a defamatory intention which would not be protected by freedom of speech rights. They described the book as an ‘opinion’ based on the logic of evidence in the criminal case files, and said its ‘intention was informative and defensive’.
Amaral will not have to pay the McCanns compensation. The couple face a bill for costs, with a figure still to be outlined.