Almost ten years after...

Soon, it will be 10 years after the day I drove my Honda CB 500 from Lisbon to Algarve and, in a couple of hours, arrived at Praia da Luz. There, I saw Gerry and Kate McCann, during a Press conference and took some pictures. One thing that made me curious was the elegant way they dressed – pink and blue shirts, a fashion style they would repeat many times in the following months.

My first impression, looking at Kate McCann (and I was very close, less than 2 meters...) was of a mother in deep suffering, missing a child that vanished just two weeks before. I wrote a comment about that in a online forum of a British newspaper (can't remember which one, but may be it was “The Sun”...) and I was almost lynched.

I went back home on May 25, 2007. Only after that I saw the amazing pictures of Gerry and Kate McCann getting out of the church, on Praia da Luz, smiling and laughing, as if they were celebrated something, and being greeted by a large supporting crowd – ONLY 9 DAYS after their little child disappeared. I compared their smiling faces that with the look of Filomena Teixeira, the mother of Rui Pedro, a 11 years old Portuguese child that disappeared on 1998 and I was shocked.

 Then, at the end of June 2007, I found a interview of Gerry McCann to the “Daily Express” ⁽¹⁾, talking about a event he was planning, some kind of musical event, with the help of a few big stars. So, exactly one month after Madeleine McCann disappeared, her father was making long term plans and talking about the first anniversary (????) of her disappearance: “We want a big event to raise awareness that she is still missing (…) It wouldn’t be a one-year anniversary, it will be sooner than that.”

If there is a God, I hope justice could be made, one day...

(1) – Don't waist your time looking for this interview on the “Daily Express” site. It was deleted long ago, but several blogs and forums have it.