Portugal's public prosecutor Jose Magalhaes e Menezes is proceeding with legal moves to ask British police to interview Gerry and Kate McCann and the rest of the so-called Tapas Nine over their movements on the night of Madeleine McCann's disappearance. (Daily Mail Tuesday 8th January 2008)The news has triggered fears detectives are ready to charge Mr and Mrs McCann.
Portuguese police want to speak to the seven friends who dined with the McCanns at the tapas restaurant in the Ocean Club holiday complex in Praia da Luz on the evening of May 3 last year.
Letters from the prosecutor sent to British police have been delayed for several months because of the lengthy bureaucratic process involved. The McCanns have welcomed the new interviews in the hope they can clear their names as suspects in their four-year-old daughter's disappearance.
They want to quiz the so-called Tapas Nine to clear up alleged "inconsistencies" in their stories about what happened in the Mark Warner resort on the night Madeleine went missing.
A team of Policia Judicial investigators, lead by Paulo Rebelo, drafted the questions which were then revised and translated by the public prosecutor's office. They were approved by judge Pedro Frias, who is overseeing the investigation. The legal letters were sent on Monday afternoon by Mr Magalhaes e Menezes, the public prosecutor in Portimao, near Praia da Luz, through the EU body Eurojust.
British authorities will receive them by the end of the week and will then make preparations to interview the so-called Tapas Nine. Portuguese detectives will fly to the UK to sit in on the interviews, which will be carried out by officers from Leicestershire police. Shortly afterwards public prosecutors said they did not have enough evidence to justify fresh interrogations.