By Junia Mink
12:51, April 11th 2008
Kate and Gerry McCann, parents of missing Madeleine, responded with anger to publication of leaked transcripts of interviews with Portuguese police last year. According to BBC News, the transcripts suggested that on the morning she vanished, Madeleine asked her mother why she did not come when the children were crying the night before. McCanns’ spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, named the leak as a “deliberate smear.”
Madeleine’s parents called for the Portuguese Justice Ministry in order to start an investigation into the leak, which breaches the country’s strict judicial laws. Mitchell explained Madeleine told her mother “Why didn't you come to me and Sean [Madeleine's younger brother] when we were crying last night?” and mentioned Kate was puzzled by that, as she was “checking her every half an hour and they had seen no evidence and heard no evidence that she was crying.”
The McCanns have been in Brussels promoting a new EU-wide monitoring system for kidnapped children. They urged the European Union on Thursday to implement a cross-border alert system for missing children, similar to one used in the United States. The system is credited with aiding to find 400 children abducted in the US since 2003, most of them in the 72 hours, Reuters reports.
130,000 children go missing every year in Europe, where only Belgium and France have such a monitoring system. It appears that the EU last year proposed an EU-wide phone hotline for kidnapped children, which is due to be implemented by member states. Kate McCann declared the chances of finding their daughter would have been bigger if the alert system was in place.
“The costs of setting up such a system are relatively low,” Kate McCann said. “Please do not wait for another child and family to suffer as we have,” she added.
Madeleine’s parents are still official suspects in the case. Their daughter disappeared lat May from her bed in a resort hotel in Portugal.
http://www.enews20.com/news_McCanns_Furious_over_Madeleine_Leak_07193.html#