Former top cop says security at Portuguese resort where Madeleine McCann went missing is as bad now as it was 10 years ago
A PIONEERING senior detective says security at the Portuguese resort where Madeleine McCann went missing is still as vulnerable today as when she vanished 10 years ago.
Recently retired Scotland Yard detective chief inspector Mick Neville travelled to the small Algarve town of Praia da Luz with The Sun to examine the scene where Madeleine was snatched aged three on May 3 2007.
Standing outside the Ocean Club resort – now called the Garden Club - where Maddie went missing, Mr Neville said: “The first thing that strikes me is that here at the complex and throughout the rest of Praia da Luz, there is an absence of cameras.
“I cannot see any visible CCTV cameras at the Garden Club and there are only a couple in the town that I have noticed.
“In my view, security here is as vulnerable now as it was when Madeleine disappeared.”
Mr Neville founded the Yard’s Central Forensic Image Team and was the architect of a system used to convict thousands of criminals by using “super recognisers” with heightened facial recognition skills to scan through CCTV images.
He is a world authority on the use of imaging in criminal detection and says: “Portugal, like many other European countries which experienced authoritarian regimes in the last century, has strict privacy laws which restrict the use of CCTV.
“That position is understandable but attitudes to surveillance are changing in countries like Germany, which recognises they can no longer be hindered by laws stemming from what happened in the 1930s and 40s while dealing with today’s terrorist threat.
“I find it hard to comprehend that even after 10 years, and what happened to Madeleine, there are still so few cameras here in Praia da Luz.
“If the same thing had happened in the UK, it is extremely unlikely an abductor could have taken Madeleine without being seen on camera.”
Analysing the disappearance of Madeleine, Mr Neville said: “Only a time machine can tell us exactly what happened.
“But it is possible to make a reasonable judgement on what is likely to have occurred.
"Another thing that strikes me immediately here is that Apartment 5a, where she went missing, is by far the most vulnerable in the complex in terms of security because of its corner position.
“That in itself could have attracted the attention of someone who wanted to take a child, whether for the purpose of raising them in a family or worse.”
On the night Madeleine went missing, Kate and Gerry were dining with seven friends they were on holiday with at a tapas restaurant in the small, two-block Mark Warner holiday resort specialising in child care.
The couple had locked the front door of the apartment but left the rear patio doors unlocked to make it easier to check on their three sleeping children as they could not be opened from the outside.
They took turns every half hour to check on Maddie and twin younger siblings Sean and Amelie, who were all sleeping in a bedroom at the front of the apartment.
The couple say the window in the children’s bedroom, looking out into car park area at the front of the building, was closed and the shutter down, making it impossible to open from the outside.
Their apartment was 70 yards from the restaurant but separated by a wall.
To gain access they had to walk out of the resort through a reception area onto a road, Rua Dr Francisco Gentil Martins, and then up a slope - a total of around 120 yards - to a waist high gate leading to the rear of the apartment.
To have locked the patio doors and gone through the front door on Rua Dr Agostinho da Silva into the apartment would have added another 50 yards.
Tapas Seven friend Matthew Oldfield offered to look in on the McCann children at 9.30pm as he was checking on his daughter in the next door apartment.
He saw the McCann twins in their travel cots but did not see Maddie, who slept in a single bed closest to the wall. He assumed she was fine. But the room, he recalled, was lighter than the others in the apartment.
Fifteen minutes earlier another of the Tapas Seven, Jane Tanner, had seen a man carrying a child in pink pyjamas, the same colour as an Eeyore T-shirt worn by Madeleine to bed. He was on the road walking away from the direction of the apartment block where Madeleine went missing from.
Kate went to check on her children again at 10pm and found Madeleine’s bed empty, the children’s bedroom window open and its shutters up with the blue curtains billowing in the wind.
Portuguese police were sceptical over how Madeleine could have left the apartment alive, leading to the McCanns eventually being placed on “aguido” status.
However, the terms of reference of Scotland Yard’s Operation Grange is focused on Madeleine having been abducted.
Mr Neville says: “It is good practice to keep all options open until it is proved otherwise.
“Though there is no evidence to suggest complicity, it means Kate, Gerry and their friends can never be totally eliminated by police from all suspicion until it is known what happened to Madeleine.”
He adds: “I do not find it realistic that a single kidnapper could
have carried Madeleine out of the window or dropped her to the ground.
"She would have made too much noise.
“However, he could have passed her through the window to an accomplice which would suggest a conspiracy.
“A single abductor would have carried her out of the front door and closed it behind him.”
Mr Neville dismisses suggestions Madeleine could have left the apartment by herself.
“She would not have gone out of the window or the front door by herself,” he said.
“Had she left by the patio door she would have gone towards her parents in the restaurant and would not have closed it behind her.”
He also rejects the idea a burglar took her. “Burglars take laptops and phones, not children,” he says.
Scotland Yard are investigating potential links with a sex attacker who carried out 12 break-ins and assaulted five British girls as young as seven at holiday resorts on the Algarve between 2004 and 2006 and then again in 2010.
However, Mr Neville,says: “It is a considerable leap for such an offender to abduct a three-year-old girl.
“There have been no other such reports in that region and I doubt whether such an attacker would stop after one.”
Jane Tanner’s sighting of the man carrying the child was later dismissed by British detectives after they traced a British holidaymaker who said it was him.
Instead, the inquiry focused on a sighting by an Irish tourist just before 10pm of another man walking past him carrying a child 400 yards from the McCann apartment and heading towards the sea.
Mr Neville said : “It is a credible sighting and his route would have taken him out of the car park area in front of the Ocean Club apartments and down a quiet and secluded street, Rue Escol Primarie.”
The route would have passed a CCTV camera outside the Hotel Estrella da Luz.
But by the time Portuguese police arrived to collect it, the film had been erased.
Mr Neville said: “It was potentially a golden opportunity to secure an image of the man and child he was carrying.
“I wonder if the hard drive was ever checked because sometimes CCTV images can still be there even if they have been wiped.”
But Mr Neville said the Portuguese do deserve credit for finding CCTV from the Paraiso beach bar restaurant in the resort which showed the Tapas Seven inside at a table at teatime on the day Madeleine went missing.
He said: “A lip reader should analyse the film because it could help to eliminate any suspicions the Portuguese police had about the McCanns.
“If something had happened to Madeleine by then, they would surely be talking about it.”
Mr Neville believes that Madeleine could still be alive and potentially could be found with the use of sophisticated facial recognition software tools, such as Facebook’s, by focusing in on a rare iris blemish in her right eye.
The forensic images expert has three daughters, the youngest aged three, and said: "It is hard to be here in Praia da Luz and not to be moved by what happened to Madeleine.”
He adds: “There have been many thousands of sightings of Madeleine across the world.“
None of them have led to her being found. Indeed, nothing new about her whereabouts has been uncovered since the night she disappeared.
“But in my view, and having examined the scene, it is not too late to find her.
“Although very rare, there are numerous examples across the world of children going missing and being found alive years later, sometimes in captivity and other times not.
“Until there is proof that Madeleine is dead, it must be assumed she is alive and the focus of the British and Portuguese investigations must be on trying to find her.”