Unbelievable Police Error and New Lead in Maddie McCann Investigation

‘HARD TO BELIEVE’ Madeleine McCann suspect

was booted out of Portugal twice for child sex crimes

but never linked to missing 3-y/o

Holly Christodoulou, The Sun

MADELEINE McCann suspect Christian Breuckner was booted out of Portugal twice for child sex offences - but cops never linked him to the missing toddler.

The convicted paedo was sent to Germany for the first time in 1999 after spending four years on the run in the Algarve.

He then served a two-year sentence for sexually abusing a child before returning to the tourist hotspot.

But in 2017, Christian Breuckner was extradited back to his native Germany for a second time to serve a 15-month prison sentence for sexually abusing a child and possession of child pornography.

The 43-year-old had been caught exposing himself at a kid's playground just a 30-minute drive from where Madeleine vanished in Praia da Luz in 2007, the Mail Online reports.

But the serial offender, who lived in Portugal on and off for around 22 years, was never put on the sex offenders register in the country.

This blunder meant cops probing Madeleine's disappearance never considered Christian Breuckner could be linked to the crime, Portuguese broadcaster RTP reports.

Presenter Sandra Felgueiras said: "It may be hard to believe, but it is true.

"The suspect in the murder of Madeleine McCann was twice extradited from Portugal to Germany for sex crimes against children but was never investigated into her disappearance from Praia da Luz."

Parents who raised the alarm after Christian Breuckner exposed himself in the playground in Sao Bartomoleu de Messines have now expressed their horror at the latest claims.

One mum said: "He could have taken my daughter.

"It is so difficult to realise that somebody linked to so many criminal case and so potentially dangerous, was so close to my daughter."

Portuguese police have confirmed the sex offender was dismissed from their inquiries into Madeleine's disappearance because they didn't know about his child sex crimes.

But it emerged last month Christian Breuckner told officers he was a sexual predator a year before she vanished.

Despite that, his confession was not recorded by police and his name was never added to a list of known sex offenders living in the Algarve.

His name should have been added to a list held by Portugal’s investigative Policia Judiciaria [PJ].

After the little girl disappeared, officials were tasked with listing all foreign nationals who had been convicted of sex crimes living in the area around the resort - meaning he should have flagged up if his name was added.

But instead, Christian Breuckner was not considered a suspect until 2017 on the tenth-year anniversary of the toddler's disappearance.

His name was given to police after he allegedly boasted to a friend in a German bar that he knew what had happened to Madeleine.

Officers then discovered he took a 30-minute phone call just before the three-year-old vanished.

The Sun revealed today police are probing a “promising” new lead

following a TV appeal

A viewer of Germany’s Crimewatch called cops to say they recognised a mobile number that suspect Christian Breuckner is said to have phoned on the night Madeleine vanished.

Police now hope to trace the Portuguese number’s owner. They are also checking banks in Portugal to see if it was topped up at an ATM.

Madeleine's disappearance remains a mystery, although German police say they know she is dead.

Cayman Islands Child Sex Abuse: Investigating the Police Investigation

“It is totally unacceptable for there to be failings such as these in the investigation of a child sex abuse allegation. I expect the RCIPS to conduct a thorough and objective investigation … to determine what went wrong. Those found responsible for the failings must be dealt with quickly and appropriately.”

— Governor Helen Kilpatrick, Sept. 16, 2016

Governor Kilpatrick has spoken with clarity, authority and righteousness. It’s an auspicious beginning to an arduous process of truth-seeking.

Most of our readers are well aware of what has sparked the governor’s ire: The recent acquittal of two suspects accused of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl, more than four years after the initial complaint was made to police.

While nobody knows what will be uncovered by the internal investigations (one a police review specifically into the aforementioned case, and one a broader audit of all ongoing child abuse cases), it appears obvious that there were significant individual and systemic failings within the police service, which allowed for the case to “go cold.”

"Cold"? Glacial!

During trial, Grand Court Justice Timothy Owen skewered the police investigation as “grossly incompetent,” not only for the inordinate delays, but also for significant gaps in evidence presented in court. The investigating police officer lost notes about the accuser’s first account of the abuse, allegedly by an uncle and cousin. Then the police never attempted to collect witness statements from anyone living in the house when the abuse allegedly occurred.

While we support the launch of the broader audit into child abuse cases by new RCIPS Superintendent Peter Lansdown, any serious probe into these issues must also extend to the Department of Public Prosecutions and into the judicial system.

How many criminal cases — not just of child abuse — are derailed for reasons rooted in ineptitude, politics, policies, who’s related to whom, who’s friends with whom, or, most broadly, the flawed architecture of the system itself? Certainly, the problems go far beyond the RCIPS.

For example, it is deeply troubling whenever we see, apparently against all odds, a case involving allegations of abuse or violence (particularly against children, women or other “vulnerable” people) make it from the police, to public prosecutors and all the way in front of a judge — and perhaps even for a guilty verdict to be handed down … only to be accompanied by a sentence so lenient that its deterrent effect fades away before the defendant has sauntered out of the courtroom and back onto the street.

On the subject of the RCIPS internal investigations, it is less than ideal for police to be investigating “their own” (particularly when the officers being investigated have not been placed on administrative leave). However, those concerns are mitigated by Superintendent Lansdown’s position and reputation, and the fact that new Police Commissioner Derek Byrne’s tenure begins in November.

The best practice might be to invite independent experts from overseas to conduct the investigations, but our memories of Operation Tempura and its spin-off Operation Cealt are far too fresh for us to conclude that “outside investigators” are a panacea in these cases.

Ultimately, the investigation will be judged not by its procedural setup, but by its thoroughness, its timeliness, its objectivity and, above all, its unredacted conclusions.

Cayman Compass

Cayman Islands Police Failure Blamed for Child Sex Abuse Acquittals

GEORGE TOWN, Cayman Islands (CNS) -- Two Cayman Islands men accused of consistently sexually abusing a child in the family home have been acquitted after the judge pointed to the “gross incompetence” of the police investigation that undermined the evidence and prejudiced the defendants so much that he had no choice but to find the men not guilty on all counts. 

The two male relatives, who cannot be named for legal reasons, were accused of abusing the little girl from when she was as young as six or seven years old until she was around 12, when she revealed the abuse to an adult at her after-school club.

See also: Sloppy Police Work Drops Child Sex Abuse Case in Caymen Islands

    George town, Grand Cayman Island

The case was heard without a jury by visiting UK judge, Justice Timothy Owen, who described it as a very “troubling case”. When he delivered his verdict via video link on Thursday, he made it clear that he did not think the child was lying.

Although he rejected the defendants’ claims that the child had made up the allegations of abuse to escape her violent mother, he said the problems in the massive delay between the victim making the complaint and the case coming to court made it difficult for him to be sure to the required standard of the men’s guilt.

Justice Owen was damning in his criticisms of the police investigation, which he described as incompetent. He made it clear it was the “inexplicable and inexcusable delays”, the failure to interview relevant potential witnesses and the loss of important notes by the police that undermined the case.

In the first unexplained delay, the police simply did nothing for some 18 months after the child gave video evidence. The judge said the “truly lamentable police response” after the child gave evidence meant that no witnesses in the house where the abuse took place were ever interviewed. As a result, there was no evidence to corroborate the child’s allegations, which were inconsistent and unspecified regarding times and places.

While the child lived in a small five-bed family home with 15 relatives, “cheek by jowl”, during the time period she claimed the abuse occurred, none of her other relatives there were ever questioned by the police.

4 Years to come to trial

The two defendants were not interviewed until more than 18 months after the allegations for a brief period, and there was another delay of approximately a year before they were charged. As a result of pressures on the court timetable, the case was heard some four years after the child was first interviewed.

The judge said he was left with no choice but to acquit due to those delays, as well as the missing notes, the lack of specific times and places regarding when the abuse occurred, inconsistencies in the young girl’s evidence at court compared with her earlier interviews, and the fact that it was difficult for the accused men to properly answer the vague charges.

He said that the defendants did not make an abuse of process application based on the delays in the case and the police mishandling, so no senior police witnesses ever appeared in court to explain the failures.

During the case the court had heard harrowing allegations about the abuse the child suffered, not only at the hands of her male relatives but also the violence inflicted by her mother, who beat her after she made the report. The court also heard how the child and her siblings witnessed their parents having sex as they had all shared a room and beds.

Despite the failures in the case, the child had been removed from the abusive home in the immediate wake of the allegations and was fostered by another relative.

This poor girl had to go through testifying for nothing, and now she gets to live on a small island with the two men who frequently raped her and the mother who beat her for reporting it.

Now the question is, has anything been done to address the spectacular incompetency of the police force? As with the Kansas City Police's spectacular incompetence, where is the oversight? Someone's head should roll, if not several heads.

Sloppy Police Work Drops Child Sex Abuse Case in Caymen Islands

Police ‘overlooked’ child sex abuse case

Cayman News Service

Grand Caymen

(CNS): The failure of the police to take any action for more than 18 months on a neglected child abuse investigation was queried Tuesday by the judge hearing the case. But Detective Constable Dave Howell was unable to explained why the case just appeared to be dropped and “inadvertently overlooked” by the RCIPS Family Support Unit for such a long time. Two local men aged 21 and 38 who are on trial accused of the attempted rape and indecent assault of a young girl were not interviewed by police until more than 20 months after their 11-year-old relative made the allegations.

As he gave evidence, DC Howell said that he had been the first person on the case as he was on call with the FSU when the child and two relatives turned up at George Town Police Station to make the complaint in November 2012. He said he spoke with the little girl and her family for about an hour and had taken notes. But those notes had apparently been lost in following an office move by the unit, the court heard.

A few days later he and another detective from the FSU interviewed the child on video. After completing those videos documenting the allegations the girl made against the men, who were 17 and 34 at the time, the police constable said the case should have been assigned to a lead investigator by Detective Sergeant Doris Morris, who headed up the FSU, but that never happened.

Describing the case as “inadvertently stalled” because no officer was ever assigned for more than 18 months when at some point someone realized that nothing had been done about the case and Howell was told to pick up the investigation.

Justice Timothy Owen, who is hearing the case without a jury, repeatedly asked DC Howell to explain how the case could have “gone to sleep” for so long and what had happened after the evidence was recorded of the child making such serious allegations. But Howell could not explain why the case was neglected until out of the blue the case was handed to him in 2014, when he then re-interviewed the young girl and then the two defendants.

Justice Tim Owen QC

“It wasn’t assigned to me so I inadvertently overlooked it,” Howell told the court. But the judge asked, “How can you inadvertently overlook serious allegations of sexual assault by a child?” The officer said that “it went dormant” and he was not able to help the court understand how the case was dropped for over 18 months.

He also admitted that by the time he picked up the case in May 2014 and began re-investigating, many witnesses were no longer in Cayman and some who were still here refused to give interviews, stating they did not want to get involved, the officer said. Other witnesses, especially other family members who lived in the home, have been overlooked in the case and were never formally interviewed.

The defendants were finally asked about the allegations by Howell in interviews in July 2014, when both men denied ever touching the child.

During his time in the witness box the detective was asked about the child’s mother, as she had been viewed as a suspect because she had left the child alone with the men, even though the girl had made the allegations of sexual abuse.

When DC Howell finally passed the case file to the prosecution service for a decision, he also recommended that the mother be charged with cruelty and neglect, but the public prosecutor did not sign off on the charge.

In her own evidence the child claimed that she had told her mother about the abuse long before she told an after-school volunteer. She told police that her mother had said she would speak to the relatives involved, after which the abuse stopped for a short time, but it started again.

The young girl told a school counsellor that the men had been abusing her for some time, forcing her to perform oral sex on numerous occasions and that on a few occasions they had attempted to have sex with her as well. After she made the allegations to the school staff member, her mother was contacted and the child reported that her mother had hit her because she had told the school about the abuse.

Soon after the allegation was made the child was removed from her mother and the house where she was being abused and was taken in by another female relative.

Both men have denied the allegations.

The Cayman Islands (/ˈkeɪmən/ or /keɪˈmæn/) is a British Overseas Territory in the western Caribbean Sea. The 264-square-kilometre (102-square-mile) territory comprises the three islands of Grand Cayman, Cayman Brac and Little Cayman. Its population is 57,000, and its capital is George Town.