Sunday Mirror Headline; says: 'Portuguese police chief Goncalo Amaral worked as little as four-and-a--half hours a day this week - despite a mountain of uninvestigated sightings of Madeleine McCann on his desk.The Sunday Mirror has discovered that 252 possible tip-offs about the four-year-old have been reported to Amaral, any one of which might just lead to her being traced. But the vast majority have not even been checked. Amaral, in charge of a squad of 30 detectives, has convinced himself she is dead, despite having no evidence for it.
And since the return from Portugal of Kate and Gerry McCann and most of the media covering the case, many in his squad have had their feet up, their main role seemingly to provide drinking companions for their boss.
The McCanns, who cling to the hope of getting Madeleine back, will be appalled that the inquiry - supposedly still running at full-steam - has effectively stopped amid a welter of boozy lunch breaks. A source close to the family said: "It is devastating for them to know leads are not being chased up. They always feared that once they left Portugal, the inquiry would peter out."
Amaral, who is himself under investigation for allegedly helping to cover up a police beating carried out to extract a confession from the mother of another missing girl, is the regional head of the Policia Judiciaria, or PJ for short.