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PRAIA DA LUZ - The Portuguese police investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann is heading for a stormy final act this week, with the former head of the inquiry promising "explosive revelations" in a hastily written book.
Goncalo Amaral, who was chief of the criminal investigation police
for the Algarve region, has scheduled a news conference in Lisbon on Thursday to launch the book, just three days after the widely expected announcement tonight that the case is being shelved by prosecutors for lack of evidence.
In the book, provisionally entitled True Lies, Amaral is also likely to reopen his assault on the role of the British police in the investigation. He has publicly suggested that they were influenced throughout by the leads which Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, wanted pursued.
He is said to be convinced that Madeleine is dead, while the McCanns have continued to press investigators to follow the trail of potential kidnappers for Madeleine's safe return.
Amaral was taken off the case last October. He is now facing perjury charges in connection with an earlier case involving the disappearance of a young girl in the Algarve, in which her mother was later convicted of murder. The woman, Leonor Cipriano, has since accused the police of beating her into making a false confession.
The McCanns' Portuguese lawyer, Carlos Pinto de Abreu, said yesterday that he expected the book to amount to "speculation" that would not affect the future course of the search for Madeleine.
Madeleine disappeared 15 months ago, only days short of her fourth birthday, from the family's flat in a holiday resort in Praia da Luz on the Algarve coast.
It is expected that the McCanns, both doctors, from Rothley, Leicestershire, England, and Robert Murat will be cleared as official suspects in the case. The British-born Murat, who received £600,000 in libel damages from a number of British newspapers last week, lives in Praia da Luz.
It was widely expected that the case would be "archived" for lack of evidence. Pinto de Abreu said that the expected "archiving" of the police case would mean that the McCanns' legal team would also be given immediate access to the case files, which would be opened for public scrutiny after a further three weeks.
He said that gaining access to the police files would mean that the McCanns would, for the first time, be able to look in detail at the hundreds of pages of information that was turned up by the Portuguese authorities during the course of the investigation.
The McCanns' private investigators could follow up potential new leads, he said, and might later ask the police to reopen their investigation as a result of this.
- OBSERVER