Portuguese police lied to McCanns

The Portuguese police have made public the 11,000-page file on the disappearance of Madeleine McCann last year, and a friend of the missing child's father says Gerry McCann was lied to in an attempt to trick him into a 'confession'. Portuguese officers had been told by a Birmingham lab that there were no conclusive traces of Madeleine's DNA found in the car her parents rented several weeks after her death, but according to the family friend, they told Mr McCann during an eight-hour interrogation that his daugher's DNA had been found.

The released files, which the McCanns hope will stop rumours about their guilt, also show that Mrs McCann refused to answer 48 questions about her daughter, presumably fearing they were intended to implicate her.

Clarence Mitchell, spokesman for the 40-year-olds from Rothley, Leicestershire, said: "You have to ask what the police were trying to achieve by over-presenting evidence that they did not have, and clearly could not claim to have."