Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Maddieballs roundup

Anorak:

And what of Alan and Cindy Thompson?
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Alan and Cindy Thompson were questioned for three hours at the weekend by officers from Leicestershire Police’s Madeleine McCann task force.
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Is this the same Alan and Cindy Thompson who..?
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The next day the Dawn newspaper, one of the biggest newspapers in Pakistan, reported that this couple had found the secret lair of Osama bin Laden.

Has the Madeleine McCann story jumped the shark yet? I keep wondering because dozens and dozens of new suspects keep being revealed. New witnesses, previously unaware of the most high-profile child disappearance in Europe, have suddenly had their memory jogged and come forward to give vital information.

But now, I sense there may be something approaching closure, with the arrival of stories about Raymond Hewlett. He is a convicted paedophile for whom we shouldn't have a tremendous amount of sympathy. But it's pretty obvious from even a rudimentary study of the case that he didn't abduct Madeleine McCann - and even paedophiles don't deserve to be framed for things they didn't do.

A couple of things to bear in mind. A convicted paedophile is the lowest of the low in the public's estimation, so it would be virtually impossible for him to sue for defamation if lies were printed about him - you pretty much can't libel someone who is already rightly viewed with contempt, even in the UK. Also, he may be dying - he's 64 (or 62, depending on which stories you read) and has been treated for throat cancer. This second element to the story is important - the dead can't sue; and "Did he take Maddie secrets to the grave?" stories are probably already being prepared for if and when he does succumb to his cancer. Sorry if this sounds brutal, by the way, but it's a brutal business.

The behaviour of the McCanns' minders seems utterly bizarre towards Hewlett. They demand he speaks to them. He says OK, I'll speak to you:

"I have nothing to hide. I am willing to talk with them," [Hewlett] said, denying any involvement in Madeleine's disappearance from a holiday apartment in Portugal two years ago.

But then Clarence Mitchell turns around like a kid in a playground:

But it was too late.
Mr Mitchell told Sky News: "He should have indicated yesterday that he was happy to talk to us."

Yes, he's someone who is supposedly a massive suspect and of great interest, and he agrees to speak to you, and then you turn around and say because he didn't say he wanted to speak to you yesterday rather than today, you're not going to do anything about it? Do you want to find this child or not? If this is such an important lead, why are you behaving so petulantly?

But no-one more official than the McCanns' hired detectives thinks Hewlett has anything to do with the McCann case. He was cleared in the police investigation and detectives do want to speak to him about historic events, but not in Praia de Luz:

The public prosecutor's office of Aachen confirms there is no connection with the Maddie case in the British official aid request. "It is a request about two cases, one regarding a rape and one attempted rape,in 1975", says Robert Deller of the public prosecutor's office of Aachen.

Meanwhile, the Mail is on the case too. I can't help feeling that they want us to read between the lines. Having been burned by the McCanns' legal team before because of printing false allegations, they are tiptoeing around the subject. See if you can work out what they're trying to say here:

D

etectives hunting for Madeleine McCann believe the Algarve is awash with child molesters, it emerged yesterday.
They have discovered there have been seven sexual assaults involving the children of tourists in the region in the last four years.
The detectives have narrowed their search to a handful of predatory paedophiles - two of whom still live in the resort of Praia da Luz.

Sexual assaults - but how many abductions? The McCann team says:

'There are 38 known sex offenders in the Algarve,' the source said. 'The area is a magnet for paedophiles. There have been seven sexual assaults involving the children of tourists in the Algarve in the last four years.
They all have the same modus operandi as Madeleine's disappearance - that is, a break-in at a holiday apartment and children molested.

Let's leave aside the 'was the apartment actually broken into?' question. There was no evidence of molestation of Madeleine McCann - is that's what is being suggested by the McCann team?

But it's not about the truth; it's about creating noise. All these leads, sightings, witnesses and so on - what do they come to? Where do they bring us? Do they really show us what happened? Well:

The Portuguese authorities said there had been no "concrete and credible facts" to justify reopening the case.

And that's the top and bottom of it.

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