Competition between different British police forces hindered the investigation into the highly publicised disappearance of Madeleine McCann, a secret report into the case suggests.
The unpublished Home Office report also stated that the lack of cooperation had a long-term negative effect on the case, and the sheer amount of UK agencies that got involved, damaged relations with Portuguese police.
A secret report into the missing person case of 3-year-old Maddie McCann states competing UK police agencies harmed the progress of the case
The report’s author Jim Gamble, former head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), said within weeks of the three-year-old going missing–Ceop, the Metropolitan Police, the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the National Police Improvement Agency–all intervened with the case.
He said this created ‘frustration’, and ‘resentment’ among Portuguese officials.
The report, which was commissioned by the UK home secretary in 2010, found that the initial response to the missing child case was ‘haphazard’ and police failed to follow up potentially crucial information.
Although the report was never publicly released, it led to the re-opening of the McCann case in 2011.
Apparently British officials were warned not to behave as a ‘colonial power’ over the Portuguese police in relation to the investigation.
Scotland Yard’s Detective Chief Inspector Andy Redwood in the joint Portuguese-British operation started on June 2 this year.
‘When this (the disappearance) happened your first gut reaction is that you want to help, a child has gone missing. In Ceop we were no different than anyone else,’ Mr Gamble told SkyNews.
‘So there is this rush to help in the early stage and I think because the UK did not have a structure for dealing with this … so everyone came with best intention, that created a sense of chaos and a sense of competition … and in many instances in my opinion wanting to be seen to help.
‘I’ve no doubt relationships from the outset with the Portuguese were impacted by it and I think that had a long-term negative effect on the investigation.’
Parents Kate and Gerry McCann hold up a picture of what Maddie might look like now, 7 years on from her disappearance
Madeleine disappeared on the evening of May 3, 2007 from her bed in a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, a resort in the Algarve region of Portugal.
Her disappearance became what the media would later dub, ‘the most heavily reported missing person case in modern history.’
Her whereabouts and what happened to her remain unknown to this day.
The case has been described as the most reported missing person case in modern history
The secret report’s findings are echoed in a forthcoming book titled Looking for Madeleine. In the book, the author Anthony Summers states:
‘It was a case of too many cooks, all well-intentioned, spoiling the broth of the initial investigation, and then the mistakes, or should I say mis-steps, began to pile one upon another.’
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