A young Polish woman claiming to be Maddie has the McCanns take a DNA test despite police insisting the girl is dead
We were used to only hearing about Madeleine McCann as the date of May 3 approached, the day of her disappearance in the Algarve nearly 16 years ago. The case of the world’s most wanted girl had entered an “off-peak” period, especially after the name of Christian Brueckner, a German pedophile serving a sentence in a German prison for raping an elderly woman in Portugal, was dropped in 2020. came out. The German Public Prosecution Service believes that Brueckner kidnapped the little British girl and killed it shortly afterwards.
This week, the case has resurfaced violently after a young Polish woman named Julia Faustyna claimed on her Instagram profile that she is Maddie, providing photos of her physical resemblance and shared facial features. In a matter of days, she added 900,000 followers to her cause, prompting Kate and Gerry McCann, “my real parents,” as she says, to undergo a DNA test to clear any doubts. The police discredit his version, claiming that the girl is dead, though her body still does not appear.
Madeleine McCann was 3 years old when she disappeared from her bed in apartment 5A of the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz, in the Portuguese Algarve, on the night of May 3, 2007. The girl slept next to her siblings (Sean and Amelie, two-year-old twins) while her parents, both doctors by profession, dined with friends at a restaurant in the same resort no more than 100 meters from the apartment. Neither of them woke up all night, leading Portuguese police to question whether the three children were sedated, a point Madeleine’s parents have repeatedly denied.
Portugal launched an unprecedented search. In 2007, more than a thousand agents were deployed. Airports and ports across the country and the borders with Spain were guarded. The case was also investigated by Scotland Yard, but there was more competition than cooperation between the Portuguese and English police. They both agree that Maddie is dead, but the body is still missing nearly 16 years later.
The case took an unexpected turn two months after Maddie’s disappearance, in July 2007, when dogs specialized in tracking blood traces from the United Kingdom discovered biological traces of the little girl in the apartment in the Algarve and in the car the family had rented. .
The Portuguese inspector Gonçalo Amaral, first in charge of the investigation, defended that the girl died accidentally at the hands of her parents and that they simulated her disappearance, a hypothesis that clashed head-on with that of the kidnapping, supported by the family and the English police . Amaral was pulled from the case in October 2007, and after being locked out, wrote a book, “Maddie: The Truth of the Lie,” directly implicating Kate and Gerry McCann in the accidental death. Maddie’s parents unsuccessfully tried to stop its publication in court.
In July 2008, the Portuguese Prosecutor’s Office decided to close the case of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance and clear her parents of suspicions of involvement due to lack of evidence. But in 2020, it was reactivated thanks to the German lead pointing to a new suspect: Christian Brueckner, a 45-year-old man who was 29 at the time of the event. The German suspect, who is currently detained in Oldenburg for assault committed in the same tourist area where Maddie disappeared in 2007, she was near Praia da Luz on May 3, as evidenced by the placement of her cellphone.
After years of clues, theories and suspects that go nowhere, the most solid hypothesis is being defended by German investigators, who believe McCann was murdered by Brueckner, an unscrupulous sexual predator with a long list of drug trafficking, pedophilia and sexual abuse allegations. crimes committed between 2000 and 2017 in Portugal. He is the first and only defendant in the case. Last November, Brückner wrote a letter from his German prison denying the allegations and pointing out that there is a plan to frame him.
Maddie’s is the most mediatic disappearance of a minor to date. The McCanns were hosted by Pope Benedict XVI and hired a public relations team to manage press dealings. Movies, TV series, documentaries and books have been made about the case. The parents set up a foundation to help with the search for their daughter, raising more than $1.5 million, but they used part of the money to pay off their mortgage in two installments, sparking new controversy at the time about the use they made of the donated money. Nearly fifteen years later, the case has amassed 12,000 pages of official information, more than 2,000 police investigations, and a list of more than 600 suspects.
The case has been “asleep” for a long time, waiting for the media to recall the anniversary of the event, as it does every May 3, and talk about Maddie and her strange disappearance again. But it has ‘awakened’ with the surprise of Julia Faustyna Strolls, a 21-year-old girl living in Poland is adopted and claims to be Madeleine. Maddie is two years younger, but Julia claims her age could be wrong. His Instagram account (iammadeleinemccan) where he provides images of the similarities with Maddie and her parents continues to add followers. Within a few days it will already be close to 900,000. Such was the commotion that she managed to get Maddie’s parents, Gerry and Kate McCann, “my real parents”, as she claims, to undergo a DNA test. The young woman’s representative assures that the adoptive mother does not want to help her daughter discover her true identity.
The girl is convinced she is Maddie and is based on her physical resemblance and the presence of exceptional features such as a small birthmark under her left eye, a series of freckles on her legs, and even a rare eye condition known as coloboma. , a kind of groove in the central part of the pupil. He also says they share the dimple and similarities in the smile and other facial gestures. Does this mean she is, as she claims, Madeleine McCann? The police think not.
Scotland Yard believes we are dealing with another false testimony. To support this claim, London police experts have used robot aging to see if there is a match. And they claim it’s nothing like it. In addition, they believe that Maddie died shortly after her disappearance. Added to this are the statements made on Tuesday by Francisco Marco, former director of the Método 3 detective agency, which once investigated Madeleine’s disappearance.
In an interview on the Catalan radio station RAC1, Marco pointed out that he carried out biometric research (behavioral or physical characteristics such as fingerprints, facial patterns, palm, retina, iris…) and compared his evidence with other photos of Julia Faustyna and, according to her analysis, do not match Madeleine’s characteristics. “I may think it’s fraud, but I can’t say it without proof,” he said on radio.
During these ten years Maddie has been ‘seen’ in New Zealand, Malta, the United States, South Africa and several cities in Spain… One of the most talked about moments was a photo taken by some Spanish tourists in a village in the near the city of Tetouan, in Morocco, in which a girl who looked like Maddie appeared. But that blond, European-looking, blue-eyed, fair-skinned girl wasn’t the most wanted girl in the world. The McCann family, who have always defended that their daughter is alive, continue to search, waiting for the DNA test and feeling another disappointment or the greatest joy of their lives. Maddie would have turned 20 on May 12.
Source: La Verdad
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