A British expat is offering the ultimate in bad taste sightseeing tours of Praia da Luz to identify the important sites in the Madeleine McCann disappearance and police inquiry.
The free trips, organised by a British expat pensioner, take visitors to Apartment 5A at the Ocean Club Hotel where the three-year-old was last seen alive and to the tapas restaurant where her parents, Gerry and Kate McCann dined with friends on the evening Madeleine vanished.
The organiser next takes his clients to the nearby wasteland which police dug up are invited to speculate on the involvement of Madeleine’s parents in her disappearance.
Then they visit the spot near the apartment where the McCanns’ friend Jane Tanner claimed she saw a man carrying a child. Then the scene of the sighting by a retired businessman who said he saw a man carrying a child in the direction of the beach.
These tours, nicknamed the ‘Luz Challenge’, have not gone down well among the residents of Praia da Luz.
The Briton uses a blog to organising the tours and appears unconcerned that his scheme is close to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to good taste, says he is offering his version of “Mission Impossible” to work out what happened to Madeleine.
One part of this new tourism experience is for those sick enough to go on the tour, “to come up with a way in which the McCanns, for whatever reason, disposed of Madeleine’s body, and the body was not found in searches.”
As for the name of the organiser, he states, “I prefer to remain anonymous, in the background, a non-character in the case. That means my musings are more likely to be judged on merit alone. Hopefully, that in turn maximises the chance of working out what happened to Madeleine McCann.”
