It is nearly 10 years since Madeleine McCann’s disappearance.
Back in May 2007, the 3-year-old disappeared from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, a resort in the Algarve region of Portugal. Her parents Kate and Gerry McCann have campaigned and fundraised for what has been described as “the most heavily reported missing-person case in modern history” ever since.
But Portugal’s Supreme Court has ruled that neither has formally been proved innocent for Maddie’s disappearance, and can’t be assumed to be so. The couple were ruled out as ‘arguidos’ (formal suspects) in 2008, but judges have stressed that this does not equate to a ruling of innocence.
The same court also ruled against their last-minute appeal by the McCann’s over ex-police chief Goncalo Amaral’s book ‘The Truth of the Lie’, that claims that the McCanns were responsible for their child’s death.
The 76-page ruling states:
“It should not be said that the appellants were cleared via the ruling announcing the archiving of the criminal case…
“That ruling was not made in virtue of Portugal’s Public Prosecution Service having acquired the conviction that the appellants hadn’t committed a crime…
“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.”
