Daily Express Front Page for Monday 27th August 2007Daily Express 'Madeleine' headline; reads: 'New slurs claim that McCanns’ car keys had the ‘scent of corpse’ The campaign of slurs against Kate and Gerry McCann continued last night after it was claimed the scent of a corpse had been detected on their car keys. The allegations, in a Portuguese newspaper, are the latest in a long line of lurid and hurtful stories hinting that the couple were somehow to blame for their daughter’s disappearance. According to the Diario de Noticias publication, highly trained sniffer dogs, used by a team of British detectives working in Portugal, found a strong scent of a corpse on the keys to the couple’s hire car. The paper also claimed the dogs had detected a sample of blood in the boot of the silver Renault Scenic, which was one of 10 vehicles closely examined by detectives. However the car was not hired by the couple until five weeks after Madeleine went missing, exploding the theory that it could have been used to move her body.
According to Portuguese sources, detectives have been looking at the possibility that the car keys were contaminated after coming into contact with something else which had been in close proximity to a corpse. But another source suggested the police were interested in speaking to the person who hired the vehicle before the McCanns.
A friend of the McCanns said last night that the allegations were “beyond ludicrous”. The friend said: “To say this sort of thing is just intended to cause pain to people, whose only interest is finding their daughter. It is nasty, vindictive and beyond ludicrous.”
The McCanns’ car was one of 10, which were stripped and examined by detectives as part of a fresh round of searches carried out three weeks ago.