Kate and Gerry McCann are embarking on a new legal battle seeking to overturn last month's court ruling that failed to clear them of being involved in their daughter Madeleine’s disappearance, as indicated in the book by Gonçalo Amaral (pictured).
The couple’s lawyer confirmed the McCanns are to challenge claims by the former police inspector, Goncalo Amaral, that they had somehow had faked Madeliene’s abduction from an apartment in Praia da Luz in May, 2007.
In January, Portugal’s Supreme Court rejected a libel appeal relating to Amaral’s 2008 book, “The Truth of the Lie,” that alleged that Madeleine had died in the holiday apartment and that her parents had faked a kidnapping to cover up her death.
The McCanns had been successful in a 2015 libel action against the former police inspector, but a court overturned the decision in April 2016, leaving the McCanns exposed to legal costs and the likelihood that Amaral would sue them.
The McCanns have decided to launch the new legal challenge based on the judges’ 76-page appeal ruling issue in January 2017, which stated that their decision “was determined by the fact that the public prosecutor had not managed to obtain sufficient evidence of the crimes by the appellants.”
The Judges said the archiving of the criminal case did not mean the McCanns had been cleared of criminal responsibility.
The summary states that “even the archived ruling raises serious concerns relating to the truth of the allegation that Madeleine was kidnapped."
Concluding that Amaral’s book intended to be ‘informative,’ the judges found that Amaral had not acted illicitly and the book had no "defamatory intention" behind it.
The McCanns said at the time of this latest disappointment that, "We will of course be discussing the implications of the Supreme Court ruling with our lawyers in due course."
This they have done and the result is a new legal battle to overturn the court ruling that failed to clear them of being involved in their daughter Madeleine’s disappearance.
