The Murder of Madeleine McCann

This week’s developments in the tragic Madeleine McCann case are not particularly significant, save that they suggest a link to Germany, as I have been saying since 2007. Christian Brueckner may be in the running for the worst personality in Germany award, albeit that he faces some pretty stiff competition, but he is essentially a patsy. The Patton Assassination will have to wait until next week, I’m afraid.

I’m not saying that Brueckner was not involved. We’ve known since 2007 that the McCanns’ holiday apartment in Praia da Luz was under surveillance prior to the kidnap. The only issues were for how long, how many watchers and who they were.

Madeleine (not ‘Maddy’ – she hated being called that) was photographed on the beach at Sagres, Portugal, on Sunday April 29^th. It’s likely that the surveillance started that night. It’s highly unlikely that there was only one watcher. There might only have been one watcher at any particular time, but there must have been a team of them.

Brueckner may have been one of the watchers. He was certainly in Praia da Luz when Madeleine was kidnapped on the evening of Thursday May 3^rd 2007. I remember the date well – I had just won a parish council by-election and found out about a missing British toddler in the Algarve when I got home from the count. (We had a major breakthrough on the night I was supposed to sign the acceptance papers, thus triggering a casual vacancy, which apparently inspired the novel of the same name by J.K. Rowling, who with respect might have done better to stick to Harry Potter.)

His subsequent behaviour, such as getting his Jaguar automobile re-registered in Germany, was such as to excite suspicion. He is a known sex offender, about to be released from prison, and is a suspect in the abduction of another toddler, poor Inga Gehricke. However neither the Jag nor a VW campervan he also used in Portugal had any trace of Madeleine’s DNA in them, unsurprisingly, since she never went anywhere near them.

Brueckner never laid a hand on Madeleine and wasn’t even in the same country (Belgium) when she was tragically murdered in or about December 2008. There are reliable sightings of Madeleine in Cordoba, Argentina, Vicuna, Chile and Montpellier, France, verified by the military or internal intelligence agencies of each country. So far as I know Brueckner wasn’t even in the same countries at the material time.

At most he was an accessory, and I’m not even sure of that. He might have been a watcher, although with his police record he would have been a poor choice. The Polícia Judiciária may have been right to close their file, as long ago as 2008. Christian Brueckner is not a new name in the Madeleine McCann case – he was eliminated from police enquiries twelve years ago.

The MSM aren’t thinking this through. Pedophiles normally restrict their odious activities to a particular gender and age range. The four sex crimes Brueckner (not his birth name) have been linked with involve girls aged three and five (Madeleine and Inge), a 72 year old woman in Praia da Luz and a little German boy, René Hasee, probably seized on the Algarve in June 1996. The poor little chap was aged just six.

To have the same pedophile commit sex crimes on a 72 year old woman and a six year old boy would be rare. I am sometimes accused of being anti-German, although I have no idea why! I’m no more anti-German than Bomber Harris. Not least since I’ve been the victim of a false accusation myself I am not prepared to tolerate a false accusation against anyone, German or not, pedophile or not. Christian Brueckner is a convenient whipping boy, no more than that, whose involvement in the McCann case was peripheral at best.

The MSM’s intellectual black hole

The MSM, like Leicestershire Police, long ago fell into what Professor Law has described as an ‘intellectual black hole’, a mental fixation so deep that reason cannot penetrate and no escape to rational thought is possible. They’re like a spaceship in a Disney movie.

They have obsessed on the idea that Madeleine was kidnapped by a lone pedophile. There are lone pedophiles but they usually murder their unfortunate victims within 24 hours. We know that Madeleine was kept alive for more than 18 months after her kidnap. How could one man keep an active toddler under control for 18 months, let alone move her across the Atlantic, twice? The very idea is preposterous.

Praia da Luz was turned upside down after Madeleine’s disappearance. No trace of her was found, inevitably, since she wasn’t there. In a pathetic attempt to smear Madeleine’s poor parents the PJ got some clothing off a corpse at the local morgue then brought in sniffer dogs, who of course wagged their little tails off.

It was a good training exercise for the pooches but nothing more – cadaver dogs can only smell a cadaver, or items which have been on or near a body, not a particular body. That rather significant hole in the PJ’s case didn’t stop Internet trolls having a go at the McCanns of course.

Anyone with a sense of decency might have thought that they have suffered enough. They were no more involved in the kidnap and murder of their own child than they were in the Great Train Robbery, and I know all the names of the Great Train Robbers, including the bagman (E) and the banker (S), who were never prosecuted. (I also knew the trial judge, Sir Edmund Davies, a nice chap, but willing to take ‘guidance’ on sentence!)

Nobody obsessing on the absurd lone pedophile theory is ever going to get anywhere near the truth. Leicestershire Police were ideal bunnies – as Air Marshal Sir John Walker observed to me at the time, ‘if they wanted her found Michael they wouldn’t have given the job to Leicestershire Police’, or words to like effect. No offense intended (some of their officers, such as DC Ivor Messiah, were decent coppers who genuinely wanted Madeleine found), but the Leicestershire constabulary would be stretched policing a fox-hunt. Think Police Squad in the Naked Gun movies.

Is Madeleine dead?

Sadly, she is. I’ve been saying so since I was given the awful news in January 2009 by a source inside the DVD. I was rubbished at the time but I see that the federal German police have now swung round to my point of view.

No-one wants to be the bearer of sad tidings, but to hold out on the parents of a murdered child is cruelty. That was my view in 2009 and it hasn’t changed in the years since. Kate and Gerry McCann, along with the twins, Madeleine’s brother and sister, are entitled to closure. The grieving process cannot begin until there is confirmation that Madeleine has gone.

By encouraging them to think that their child is still alive the Metropolitan Police, acting on the instructions of the Cabinet Office, have perpetrated a cruel hoax on the McCann family. The McCanns should be paid massive compensation for the deliberate infliction of emotional distress, as the Met have acted in bad faith throughout, no offense intended. The Cabinet Office of course have known the truth all along.

The only comfort that I can offer the parents is that there is absolutely no indication at all that their child was violated. I say that for three reasons. Once the hue and cry went up the DVD realised that they were in trouble and that continued British membership of the EU was in play. They were very careful to see that no physical harm came to Madeleine, right up to the point where she was murdered, humanely, if the murder of a five year old girl can ever be called humane, by a series of injections, with a sedative preceding the lethal injection.

Secondly, the Stockholm Syndrome kicked in. Madeleine charmed her kidnappers and some of them became quite fond of her. Thirdly, we had a source, a courageous Russian who was later murdered by the DVD, in the outer security perimeter guarding her in her final safe-house, in Belgium. She was well and showed no sign at all of physical abuse.

Who kidnapped Madeleine and why?

The story of the kidnap and subsequent murder of Madeleine McCann is one of the most shameful episodes in modern history. I warned at the time that those playing politics with the life of a four year old girl (she turned four not long after she was kidnapped) would live to regret it.

The DVD operate two pedophile rings in Brussels, one specialising in blackmailing the Belgian government, civil service and judiciary, and the other in blackmailing senior NATO and EU officials. They supply both young boys and girls. For over a decade prior to the McCanns’ tragic holiday they were snatching young children from the Algarve. Little Renée, sadly, was probably amongst them.

Standard operating procedure in 2007 was to send multiple JPEG files of the children to private email addresses, where the abuser would select the boys or girls he wanted. No payment was involved, at any rate not financial payment. The DVD weren’t looking for cash – they were looking for political favors. Typically the children were then murdered in snuff movies, which were sold to finance the operation.

We found one of the snuff movie facilities, near Toledo in Spain. NRO /NSA satellite imagery showed it to be surrounded by pathetically small graves. It didn’t last long, not after that briefing I gave to Spanish counter-intelligence officers in the courtyard of the Spanish Embassy in London. (They obviously thought their office was bugged and they were probably right!)

A Russian spotter for the ring supplying the European Commission took that photo of Madeleine at Sagres beach, surreptitiously, using the inbuilt camera of the latest Blackberry. The photo, along with the photos of two other small girls, was then emailed to the private account of a senior EU official (I know who he is, the bastard, and will name him once he’s dead) in Brussels.

Madeleine was kidnapped to order and taken out by sea from Lagos Marina. Satellite imagery confirmed a swap at sea to another small boat, a sailing vessel, then to a larger boat, a motor vessel, which the DVD hauled off a drugs run from the São Tomé and Príncipe archipelago. This vessel took shelter in Moroccan waters.

I headed up a counter-intelligence team from Gerard Group International in Massachusetts – good people. We made no charge for our services and brought in contacts from all around the world, including Morocco, the States, Israel and Chile. A rescue plan was vetoed by the British government, on Cabinet Office advice, shamefully.

We then lost track of Madeleine, indeed as I advised at the time once she was back on land a rescue bid became very problematic. Moreover there was always a time-lag on the intelligence. The only time we had real-time intel, supplied by aircraft, satellites and drones, was when she was on that boat, held in an anechoic chamber designed for the purpose.

Operation Canberra was conducted on a scale way beyond the imagining of Leicestershire Police or the family. It involved at least two SSNs, a Russian SSK, specially-equipped aircraft, including a Boeing 707 Falcon and, of course, satellites, at least one of which, a KH-13, had its orbital trajectory shifted. I was liaising with the Pentagon, SOUTHCOM and EUCOM. (The Bar Standards Board went very quiet when I exhibited my working file on Operation Canberra, with direct dial numbers at the White House, the Pentagon, EUCOM and SOUTHCOM.)

I was getting military satellite imagery in brown envelopes. One Leicestershire detective was gobsmacked when I told her the color of the Renault Clio in which Madeleine was taken to the first boat, although I had already explained that I was working with the NSA, who were extending full, deniable cooperation, wonderful people that they are.

The SOSUS net in the North Atlantic was reactivated to near Cold War levels of readiness. Two DVD SSKs (refitted Type XXI U-Boats) were tracked inbound to Argentina from the São Tomé group and outbound from Argentina to the Camargue on south coast of France, an ideal infiltration point. The sonar signatures of those two boats were given very, very quietly to the Russian Navy.

We failed to rescue Madeleine but the numbers of children kidnapped in São Paulo and Paris went down and the Spanish CNI, to their immense credit, shut down a DVD ring in Madrid as well as that snuff movie facility of course. (I am told that hardened intelligence officers wept when they saw that imagery and I don’t blame them.) Since kidnapped kiddies from São Paolo were being shipped to the facility in the São Tomé group by SSK the Brazilian Navy showed a sudden interest in acquiring SSNs.

We lost two people, our brave Russian source, and an equally brave DIA officer, murdered by ex-EOKA terrorists in Cyprus. (We were using Cyprus for intel exchanges with inter alia Mossad and the Defence Intelligence Staff.) Without UK government support and backing from the family we were powerless to launch a rescue mission, which in any event would have been fraught with peril for the little girl. You don’t want a child in the middle of a firefight if you can avoid it, although personally I thought the balance of risk favored a rescue attempt, coming in from the ocean side, at about 0300 local time.

The Bad Guys lost more. A bunch of SEALS officially on a goodwill visit to the Gulf of Guinea turned up at the facility in São Tomé. They weren’t invited and they didn’t show much goodwill when they got there.

Then for the first time since the Second World War the Russian Navy, to be precise the Northern Fleet, engaged a German U-Boat in combat. She was one of the two which had been involved in transporting Madeleine. She was on a drugs run to northern Norway with a load of Colombian cocaine on board and was tracked, very skilfully, by a Russian Kilo class. I suspect that the first time that the Jerries knew they were being tracked was when their hull was hit by an active sonar ranging shot. That was followed in short order by the terrifying sound of bow tubes being flooded and torpedoes in the water.

There were no survivors. The cocaine washed up on a beach, in a zodiac with some dead Jerries in it, prompting a pained enquiry in my direction from Oslo, as though I had arranged the whole thing. (I hadn’t – that was down to a nice man in Moscow called Vladimir, who doesn’t like child kidnappers.)

Madeleine did not die in vain. The DVD were rocked in a way that they have never been rocked before and the lives of hundreds of young children were saved. Anglo-German relations nosedived faster than that U-Boat after she was torpedoed. Brexit came on the political agenda in an entirely new way – I made sure that the most powerful people in this country were in the loop.

I can’t tell you the whole story, not yet at any rate. Suffice to say that we have not yet fully avenged Madeleine McCann and won’t rest until we have. Someday they’ll make a movie and it will be a doozie. Offering us up the odd bit player will not appease us.

The UK/EU negotiations

These are going nowhere and rightly so, indeed as have I pointed out before they are the silliest and most pointless negotiations since Munich. The German failure to assassinate Prime Minister Johnson and his chief adviser Dominic Cummings means that there will be no extension to the transition period.

The EU are now scrambling to catch up. There is vague talk of some sort of mini-deal in the fall, but I doubt it will come to much, even if we don’t make a kinetic response to the attempt to assassinate Boris and Dominic. (The last community partner to order the assassination of a British Prime Minister was Napoleon, and we got him in the end.)

George Floyd

There has been a lot of noise from the radical left but not much in the way of rational, persuasive argument. They’re screaming blue murder but I’m still not persuaded that the poor man was murdered. I’m certainly not joining the demos, not least if protestors are going to run around endangering horses.

I’m not hearing anything about the fracture of the hyoid bone. As all y’all may recall (that rhymes by the way!) from the Epstein case the fracture of his hyoid bone was one of the pointers towards assassination. (Not so much Club Fed as Murder Inc.) If George Floyd died by strangulation I want to see a fractured hyoid, frankly.

A further wrinkle has emerged since last week – he had Covid-19. This may well have damaged his lungs, indeed it raises an issue as to what he was doing in public at all, let alone without a mask. (No offense intended, but since he was a retired armed robber I assume that he was not unfamiliar with wearing masks.)

The fact that Minnesota will presumably now be solemnly counting him as a Covid-19 stat on the basis that he died with but not of Coronavirus shows up the absurdity of Western Covid-19 stats. I seriously doubt that Covid-19 was the cause of death, indeed it can’t have been the sole cause, but it may have been a contributory factor. This isn’t a case I’d want to prosecute. I suspect that the prosecution are going to struggle with murder three, never mind murder two. That’s just Derek Chauvin – they’re going to struggle even more with the other officers.

I trust that someone on the left has noted that the supposedly racist Derek Chauvin had a Laotian wife. Generally speaking racists don’t marry outside their race. It’s not impossible to marry an Asian woman and have racist attitudes towards African-Americans, indeed you can have Asian racists as well as white racists if it comes to that, but it’s not usual.

It’s not the only anomaly in the case either. There are some curious aspects to the notorious video broadcast by CNN. Put another way media organisations might just want to take a second look before using it.

General Mike Flynn

The FBI are now in very deep water indeed. It transpires that the FBI had the transcripts of the conversations between General Flynn and HE the Russian Ambassador. The conversations were not only entirely innocent, they were entirely sensible as well.

The FBI went after an innocent man, knowing he was innocent. Boomps-a-daisy. It’s the most shameful incidence of entrapment by the FBI since the prosecution of John Z. DeLorean at the urging of the German automobile industry, who felt threatened by his genius.

Judge Sullivan (the silly Judge Sullivan that is, no offense intended – there’s also a sensible Judge Sullivan) now has no option but to permit the general to retract his guilty plea. If he doesn’t His Honor will find himself being appealed faster than any federal judge in history.

Judge Sullivan, again no offense, is doing more damage to the reputation of the American judiciary than any judge since Roy Bean. As all y’all may know, Judge Bean (we’ve got one as well, on the High Court) laid the emphasis in his courtroom on the efficient dispatch of court business (and very often the defendant as well), as opposed to due process. Like the trial judge in my case he was a great believer in the aggressive use by the court of its case management powers.

The Lancet

That rather silly paper attacking the use of Hydroxychloroquine has now been withdrawn, and rightly so. The Editor of The Lancet, Richard Horton, has been left with egg on his face.

It would all be rather amusing save that some governments and doctors have fallen for this nonsense about Hydroxychloriquine not being effective against Covid-19. Many people who could have been saved have lost their lives as a result. Others have had their agony prolonged. Richard Horton should have listened to President Trump!

Michael Shrimpton

Michael Shrimpton was a barrister from his call to the Bar in London in 1983 until being disbarred in 2019 over a fraudulently obtained conviction. He is a specialist in National Security and Constitutional Law, Strategic Intelligence and Counter-terrorism. He is a former Adjunct Professor of Intelligence Studies at the American Military University.

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