How I wish I was blessed with the talent, and possessed of the disposition that I might write equally well and dispassionately as this.
Postscript July 2010
Antony Sharples writes: The Blacksmith Bureau signed off without fuss at the end of the hearings to lift the various gagging orders on Goncalo Amaral. I am not a blogger; I have no interest at all in giving opinions for their own sake. The only reason for the Bureau's brief existence was to help Amaral in his struggle with the McCanns, by providing information from police and other confidential sources which was being hidden from the public, and by acting as a link between Portugal and selected UK media.
Before that the only reason for the Cracked Mirror was to provide the public - for the first and only time as far as I know - with some idea of what the people involved in the affair were really like.
Kate & Gerry McCann have never been able to give frank and open descriptions of what happened on the night of May 3. As the Bureau posts showed, time after time they have told significant untruths while using a screen of public relations techniques and personnel to protect themselves from direct interrogation.
The nearest the pair came to real questioning - and it wasn't very near, either - was in police headquarters in Portimao between May 4 and May 10. It is a matter of public and judicial record, as attested in court in Lisbon during the gagging hearings by the prosecutor in charge of the case, that the McCanns lied during those interrogations.
That is the only reason I became interested in the case: not because I'm a crime story freak - far from it - nor because I thought the parents were criminals or monsters. Within weeks of reading reports of the disappearance of the child it was clear to me and others, as it later became clear to the prosecutor who wrote the 2008 report that the McCanns claim "cleared them", that they were not telling the truth. The question, which has never been answered, is why were they not telling the truth? What possible reason or justification could there be for the parents of the missing child to lie to the police? More The Blacksmith Bureau.
