Met chief 'indicates' Madeleine McCann probe may be wound down

[Liketochat1]

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/madeleinemccann/9497581/Yard-chief-suggests-Madeleine-probe-may-be-wound-down.html. The investigation has cost 2.5 million since it opened 15 mths ago at the request of David Cameron. Should the 'open cheque' continue for as long as it takes to find concrete evidence of what happened to her? Or should it be wound down as the Portuguese police refuse to reopen the inquiry? What do you think?

I think it is inevitable it will be wound down. Of course, it is devastating for the parents, but many crimes have their investigations wound down as time goes on- the public sector does not have a bottomless purse. I am sure any new evidence that came to light would be considered.

Of course it should be wound down. It is a matter for the Portugese police, not the British. The police published their reasons for closing the case at the time, they are freely available for anyone to read, translated into English. It is pure xenophobia for the British to rubbish a foriegn investigation.

If the British plice have time and moeny to look for missing people, they should start wth the ones that have disappeared here, like this person here

If there is still work to be done that could lead to the McCann family finding Madeleine, then the investigation should continue, no matter what it costs. You cannot put a price on the life of a child.

The investigation should only be wound down when there is literally nothing left that can be done. And even then, the police should be open to investigating any new leads that come to light.

It is not xenophobic for the British to rubbish a foreign investigation if the investigation in question was conducted badly. Which this one was.

On what basis do you say the investigationwas done badly? There si plenty of eveidence the police investigated to the full extent possible. Regarding the British plice involvement, if they didn't Tia Sharp's body in her own house during repeated searches, what hope is there for them finding that of a child who disappeared severals year ago in another country?

I don't really want to get into the specifics of a case, but the fact that they allowed the family to remain in the crime scene for hours before they began forensic investigations is a start on where they went wrong. I see your point about there possibly not being much hope for the British police, but presumably if they have been able to spend the man hours mentioned in the article investigating, then there must be something for them to do.

Outraged - where is the money going to come from if you want to allocate at least £2.5 million to each missing child case? What do you suggest is less important?

We put 'prices' on children's and everyone else's lives every day. It's a budgetting reality. Grim but a reality.

If it means, as it suggest to me, that everything has now been reviewed, and there are no overlooked leads to pursue; then it is sadly correct that, unless fresh information is found or there is a plausible confession, there is nothing that can be done at this stage.

I doubt anyone in the police/Govt would think "price tag"; indeed the review to date suggests quite the contrary.

There are hundreds of missing children every year that don't get anything like the publicity or the funding that this one case has had. If you are looking at it with your brain and not your heart, the case is no longer active and further investigation will pull funding and time from other, more recent cases that are as important.
So I agree that the official cheque book should be closed, although of course the family will never stop looking.

I think it's fair to say we don't spend this kind of money saving everyone. There are cancer patients, for example, for whom certain treatments are considered too expensive. I don't know the details of the Portuguese investigation or why they wont reopen the case. All I thought was odd was that the Mc Canns weren't asked to leave the holiday apartment sooner so evidence could be taken more quickly without being contaminated.

Liketochat1
"I don't know the details of the Portuguese investigation or why they wont reopen the case."

As far as I am aware all the mccanns have to do is ask.

As far as I'm aware Boney the Mc Canns have asked the Portuguese police to reopen the inquiry, as have the British police force.

The McCanns could ask it to be re opened iirc from reading but they never have. They would need to go back to teh beginning i think and go into that night in detail

It's a shame we don't have the money to do everything for everybody but I think we, as UK taxpayers, cannot keep paying out more and more for one particular child when there are so many other tragic cases.

This case has already attracted far more publicity and funding than others. It's simply not possible to keep throwing money at something, and tbh after all this time it seems highly unlikely any official search or review is going to uncover anything useful

I think that the McCanns still have the option to get the case reopened in Portugal, should they wish to, as I think that it was the failure to obtain a reconstruction that led to the case being shelved.

We dont know what the UK police have managed to discover so far - if they have found some new information, come to some new conclusions or feel able to obtain new information then thats one thing, but if they are at the same dead end the Portuguese police were, with no obvious way forward then it might not be worth pursuing further at this point.

Seems inevitable.

I am wondering why more wasn't made of the roadworks that were being undertaken and if the road was scanned to see if there were human remains beneath.

I feel sorry for MM parents.

I think there was a lot of faces at the time about the fact the kids were left, whether the friends were telling the truth, and I wonder if that hampered the search.

I feel for Ben Needham's mum. She never got the same publicity though of course things were different back then. I heard something about the police wanting to dig up some ground. His mum is convinced he is still alive and that worries me if his body was found. She would have no hope left.

I wonder why there isn't more publicity when a child goes missing as MNters often post about the man kids that go missing each year but they are rarely reported. Why not? Members of the public could have seen them and not known they were missing.

I saw a child a few days after MM went missing and I knew logically, it couldn't be her but I still reported it (near a shop, good CCTV) as there was the feeling of what if? and I hadn't reported it.

I lost ds2 in a shopping centre for less than 10 minutes but I was a mess. Goodness knows how parents cope when their children are properly missing.

Of course it should wind down. Lets not kid ourselves that every child's life does not have a price.
Too many other missing children to concentrate millions of pounds on one child year after year as heart-breaking as that is to this family.
It's only gone on this long because of the publicity.

Has Mrs McCann taken the lie detector test she said she would be happy to take yet??? Perhaps that would help move the investigation forward and I', sure any UK newspaper would pick up the cost.

Oh I can't bear it when people are less than kind about the McCanns by mentioning lie detector testing and that kind of thing. Whatever you think about the sort of parents they are (and, really, who of us is a perfect parent and never made a mistake which, thank God, did not lead to serious consequences?), to have anything less than the utmost compassion for what happened to them is unbearably unkind.

Sadly, I suppose, if there is no new evidence, then the case must be "wound down" or whatever eventually. However, do you remember the case of the boy's torso that was found in the Thames in the 90s (I think)? I remember watching a documentary where Met police officers had travelled to Nigeria in the course of the investigation and the Nigerian police officers were astounded at the level of persistence from the British officers in what seemed, to them, a hopeless case. Sadly, the case was never resolved but I feel proud to be part of a nation that is prepared to spend money and go to great lengths to find justice for one unknown child.

What rosa said.

The torso boy was a terrible tragedy, and rightly the Met went to Nigeria etc to try to get to the bottom of it. Probably the reason why people ask questiions about the Mccann case is that they were so indignant at the cheek of being questioned, when in any case like this, obviously the parents would expect to to be the prime suspects until cleared - the McCanns are intelligent enough to realise this, so you would have expected resigned co-operation, and answereing all questions in order to eliminate themselves, rather than indignant obstruction - eg re the 27? unanswered questions, hence why some people remain suspicious of them.

Adam