Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Madeleine McCann: Day 76

Four-year-old Brit Madeleine McCann has been missing for 76 days now. As you'll recall from an earlier CIT post, as well as about a billion news stories in the international press, she went missing from her family's hotel room in Portugal as her parents ate dinner within sight of the room.

The banner to the left stays there until this thing is resolved. Go check out the linked page and, maybe, donate a bit.

2 comments:

Kat said...

Her parents were not in view of the room.

The could see their building from where they sat, but not the unlocked door.

Before you encourage folks to donate to a fund, perhaps they should be better informed.

Their apartment was left unlocked. Their apartment was off the gated and secured portion of the resort. They would had to have walked a considerable distance, around a swimming pool, through a security gate, down a corridor and around the corner and down another corridor to access the apartment. They left her sleeping there with two other younger siblings.

There is far more to this case than meets the eye in many of the one sided reports - many of which laud the McCanns as wonderful parents - such as the fact none of the fund monies have been spent on hiring private investigators nor do they intend to. Gerry McCann said so himself in their first press interview. They have not lifted a finger to physically search for this child themselves.

Their travelling companions have given conflicting statements and reports to the police. They and their travelling companions have a 'pact of silence' as quoted by a journalist as having been said by one of the other doctors the family was vacationing with.

Read. Read and read some more. Search for news sources outside the UK. Note that the only thing the fund has been used for to date is to create more posters and to pay for travel and accommodations. The camp McCann is ever growing with a growing payroll to meet. Determine if even a dime is being or has been spent on any actions to actually LOOK for Madeleine. Then decide if you want to donate to this fund.

PHE said...

OK, fair enough. There are two sides to every story. The McCanns do seem to be shrewd in how they're employing the media in this story. It's certainly possible they bear more guilt in the matter than we would like to believe.

However, assuming that face value is fact, that the McCanns are not evil and don't have a direct connection to the diappearance of their daughter, I can only imagine the guilt they must feel for leaving their children so vulnerable. I'll take your account, Kat, as fact and say that was pretty stupid.

But you seem mildly obssessed with the act of "looking" for Madeleine. I get the feeling that you condem the McCanns because they're not actively involved in a physical search for their daughter. Would you have the parents out traipsing the Portugese countryside, poking through hay bales and opening outhouse doors? A mob of concerned citizens knocking on apartment doors and combing through backyard sheds?

I don't know how the Portugese authorities have acquited themselves in this matter, but I do know a little about how the US law-enforcement community would go about handling a similar case. They would want the amateurs out of the way. There's a time and a place for a massive on-foot search by trained personnel (that time and place is when and where the evidence indicates its necessary), but a stampede of untrained, unscreened volunteers is counter-productive.

I dunno. You're apparently closer to the case, so I won't discount what you have to say. However, parents of missing children get a big pass from me.