A grim, soulless place where a dusty
sea-wind whistles constantly through the
narrow streets and the darkened bazaars
seeth with intrigue, the Moroccan town
of Fnideq is Africa's last settlement.
Just around the headland of its
northern tip, beyond a chaotic,
badly-policed frontier, stands Ceuta,
the Spanish-owned equivalent of
Gibraltar. And across the shimmering
straits, so close that the houses are
clearly visible, lies the jagged
coastline of Europe, an El Dorado for
the great many shadowy types who pass
this way.
Tragically, the sight of a cute-looking
child clinging forlornly to some strange
adult hand is no great rarity here.
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Playtime: The McCanns have issued a new photo of
Madeleine as they mark six months since she went
missing from their holiday apartment in Praia da Luz |
In a land where small boys and girls are
routinely sold as house-servants and
sexual playthings, a wretched infant
cargo moves stealthily from one
continent to the next without attracting
so much as a second glance.
Last
month, however, by grace of her blonde
hair, apple cheeks and a milky
complexion, one little girl looked so
strikingly different as she was swept
along Fnideq's teeming streets in the
clutches of a middle-aged Arab woman
that someone finally took notice.
The
curious onlooker was a 24-year-old
Moroccan woman named Naoual Malhi, and -
improbable as it may seem - her sharp
observation and quick wits may yet
provide the key to the most compelling
mystery in living memory: what happened
to Madeleine McCann?
Although Morocco stands so close to
Spain and Portugal, few people here have
heard of the four-year-old English girl
who vanished from a holiday apartment
six months ago.
The
case is mentioned in newspapers and on
TV from time to time, but, fearful of
upsetting King Mohamed VI and his puppet
government, editors refrain from
mentioning the most enduring theory:
that Madeleine is being held captive by
paedophiles in Morocco.
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New
lead: Naoual Malhi is sure the girl she spotted is
Madeleine |
Moreover, two-thirds of the population
are illiterate, and most people are too
busy ekeing out a meagre living to take
more than a passing interest in world
events.
Mrs Malhi is different, however. A much
Westernised Moroccan who wears
fashionable clothes and lives in an
expat British community on the Costa del
Sol with her own four-year-old daughter,
Ines, she has avidly followed the saga
unfolding in Portugal's Praia Da Luz,
five hours' drive away along the Iberian
Peninsula.
And
because posters bearing Madeleine's face
are pinned up everywhere in the shopping
mall near her apartment in Calahonda,
near Malaga, she is familiar with
Madeleine's distinguishing features.
Of
course, Naoual Malhi, a divorcee, may
turn out to be one more unsound witness.
Or she could simply be mistaken in what
she saw. However, she does not appear to
be a crank.
Plausible and unexcitable, she is a
qualified doctor and says she hails from
a well-to-do family from Fez, Morocco's
religious and cultural capital. She has
asked for no money in return for her
information, and much of it has been
verified.
It was
in late September, at the end of a
fortnight's holiday in Morocco, that
Naoual first spotted the girl she now
refers to unequivocally as "Madeleine"
near Fnideq's outdoor market.
Though
people with fair hair and light skin
colouring are not uncommon in Morocco,
Naoual was struck by the incongruous
sight of a Berber woman, wearing
traditional Arabic clothes, carrying a
beautiful, blue-eyed, "very blonde"
girl, dressed in jeans and an orange
jumper.
In an
exclusive interview with the Daily Mail
this week, Naoual described what
happened after she drew up closer behind
them.
"The
woman spotted me looking at them and
tried to hide the girl and shield her
face," she said. "But I knew, the minute
I saw her close up, that it was
Madeleine.
Scroll down for more ...
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Map:
Recent 'sightings' of Madeleine in Morocco |
"I'd seen her picture a thousand times,
and the girl I saw was her. She had
that distinctive right eye where the
pupil runs into the iris.
"She
was exactly the same as in the pictures,
except that she had a bump like a bruise
on the left side of her forehead and her
hair was a lot shorter, like a boy's."
Naoual
paused, then added solemnly: "It is like
me seeing my mother and knowing it is
her."
This
remark was clearly meant to set the seal
on her story, for Moroccans do not make
reference to their parents lightly.
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Smile:
Madeleine by the pool on the afternoon she
disappeared |
She followed the pair to a taxi rank.
When the woman hailed one of the dozens
of rusting, six-seater Mercedes taxis in
Fnideq, Naoual tried to climb in as
well, for it is commonplace there for
strangers to share cabs. Perhaps
tellingly, however, the woman refused to
allow her to ride along.
Naoual, though, had the presence of mind
to get the driver's phone number. She
later called him to discover where he
had driven the pair, then alerted the
Spanish police.
They
came to see Naoual, and on October 6 she
was contacted by Metodo 3, the Spanish
private detective agency hired at great
expense by the McCanns to trace
Madeleine - or at least discover what
happened to her.
Since
she vanished, many people have come
forward to report seeing her, and at
least four of these "sightings" have
been in Morocco. The most recent turned
out to be the fair-skinned,
blonde-haired daughter of a Berber
farmer who bore a passing similarity to
Madeleine.
But
Metodo's seasoned investigators did not
lightly dismiss Naoual's story. They
were excited to have found someone who
claimed to have seen the now-famous
"flash" in Madeleine's iris. After
interviewing her at length, they asked
her to return with them to Morocco.
So,
earlier this month, Naoual quietly
slipped back to her home country with a
Metodo team led by Antonio Jimenez, the
former head of Spain's national
organised crime squad. They spent a week
trying to track down Madeleine.
Plainly, this latest operation has not
found her. At least, not yet. The
question is, did Naoual really stare
into the most instantly recognisable eye
in the world?
This
week, armed with information she
furnished to the private detectives,
plus other intriguing leads that have
emerged since - and a photograph of
Madeleine - I travelled more than 700
miles through Morocco in an effort to
uncover the truth behind her story.
Naoual
and the Metodo investigators began their
search with a 25-minute hydrofoil
crossing from Tarifa, Spain, to Tangier.
A one-way ticket costs a little over
?20.
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Morocco: Kate McCann visited the country as part of
a tour publicising Madeleine's disappearance |
This week, I also took this route to
Morocco. On the wall at the ferry port,
a familiar, dog-earred picture,
overshadowed by a huge Wanted poster
bearing the mugshots of six suspected
ETA terrorists, urges anyone with
information about Madeleine to call
Crimestoppers. It's written in English.
Once
in Morocco, Naoual phoned the taxi
driver, Mohamed, who told her he had
driven the woman and child from Fnideq
to Al Hoceima, a former Spanish garrison
town nestling further east along the
Mediterranean coast.
If
true, it was an unusual and expensive
journey. The 200-mile trip would have
taken five hours over tortuous mountain
roads, and the fare would have been
around ?180: a month's salary for many
Moroccan workers.
"Our
drivers take people to Al Hoceima maybe
once a month," the taxi controller at
Fnideq told me. "They always share a car
because it is so expensive."
Questioned further by Naoual, the driver
said he dropped "Madeleine2 and the
woman at a taxi rank in the town. "He
told me the girl was crying throughout
the journey and didn't speak Arabic,"
says Naoual. "He didn't know what
language she spoke in.
"The
woman didn't say much and didn't try to
comfort the girl. She told the driver
she was the daughter of her sister, who
lived in France."
The
driver, Naoual says, refused to meet her
and provide more details. Fearful of
upsetting the authorities by speaking
out of turn, he didn't want to get
involved any further.
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Poster: Madeleine's image has been widely circulated
in her parents'
campaign to find her |
As I discovered, this is the sort of
attitude that is hampering Metodo's
inquiries in Morocco. Apathy and the
culture of bribery cause further
problems; it is remarkable how many
people suddenly recognise Madeleine's
photograph when they scent a wad of
dirham banknotes.
Then
there is the problem of national pride.
Among the many ordinary Moroccans I
spoke to this week, not one was willing
to accept that paedophilia exists in
their country. This flies in the face of
a recent UN report which stated that
child brothels and sex rings operate in
most of Morocco's major cities.
Three
years ago 26 people were arrested when a
wide-reaching paedophile network was
uncovered, and last August Irishman
Christopher Croft, 66, was jailed for 12
months for drugging and abusing a
teenage boy.
Before
being sent to prison, Croft lived in
Taghazout, a small fishing village near
Agadir which is said to have been
virtually colonised by an international
group of paedophiles. According to
informed sources, the group routinely
abuse children as young as seven with
impunity, bribing local police to turn a
blind eye.
King
Mohamed's ministers will doubtless point
to recently-introduced tougher sentences
for child sex offenders as proof that
they are taking the problem seriously.
Yet at a time when foreign investment
and European tourists are pouring in as
never before, there remains a tendency
to deny there is a problem at all.
This
week, when the Mail asked a senior
government minister to comment on
reports that Madeleine is being held by
perverts in Morocco, he warned that we
could be in serious trouble simply for
investigating this scandalous
proposition.
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Broadcast: Madeleine's parents have made numerous
media appearances -
the most recent last week on Spanish TV |
The international child protection
organisation Don't Touch Our Children
dismissed a report that Madeleine might
be being forced to work as a petit
bonne, or "little maid" - the old
French colonial term for the hundreds of
children held against their parents'
will and put to work as house slaves by
wealthy Moroccan families.
"It's
nonsense," said director Amal Merimi.
"We don't have any cases of abuse [of
children] that age. Normally the maids
are 12 or 13 years old."
So if
Madeleine really was in the taxi a month
ago, what became of her after being
taken to Al Hoceima?
Naoual
and Antonio Jimenez drove to Fez, 300
miles south-west of Al Hoceima, to
request assistance from a local police
chief, a family friend.
Staggeringly, the high-ranking officer
knew nothing about Madeleine, and so
gazed blankly at her photograph.
However, when they explained that she
was missing, he agreed to help - though
not officially. And for a fee,
naturally.
The
officer enlisted lower ranking policemen
in outlying stations, who, in turn, sent
a small army of young boys to show the
picture to people in the dozens of small
towns and villages surrounding Fez, in
the starkly beautiful Rif Mountains.
Anyone who recognised Madeleine was
asked to call Naoual's mobile.
"We
got hundreds of calls that week," she
recalled. "About 200 of them said they
had spotted a girl with a woman aged
around 40 wearing a chilaba headscarf.
"Sometimes they also said there had been
a teenage girl aged between 14 and 16
with them. They thought she, too, was a
Berber and looked like the woman's
daughter.
"The
sightings were all over the north of
Morocco, mostly in the area of the Rif
Mountains. Some agreed to see us, but
others just gave the information and
hung up. There was one person - a lawyer
- who started asking for money straight
away. He said he could help us but
wanted 3,000 euros. We said no.
"Then
there was a storeholder on the
contraband market in Fnideq. He said he
had seen the girl with the woman when
she came to buy cheese and milk from his
stall. He said he gave the girl a
lollipop and noticed her distinctive
right eye."
Another elderly couple placed
"Madeleine" in Meknes, a northern city.
They had been at a funfair with their
grandchildren, and claimed to have seen
the little girl crying as she dismounted
from a train ride. They offered her a
sweet, but she replied "No" in English.
Then the woman she was with ran over,
grabbed her hand and pulled her away.
Were
all these callers simply spinning
stories in the hope of a reward? Had
they merely seen another Madeleine
lookalike? Or had they really spotted
her?
Scroll down for more ...
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Madeleine McCann: Missing since May 3 |
For the detectives, working in a country
three times the size of Britain, with
poor communications, even checking out
one of these leads was a painfully slow
process, and eventually Naoual returned
to Spain.
Still
believing Madeleine is being held in
Morocco, however, the Metodo team have
remained behind, and a few days ago,
Jiminez called Naoual again. He asked
her to phone someone who had contacted
him but spoke only Arabic, a language he
does not understand.
This
caller turned out to be rather different
from the rest: an articulate schools
inspector from a sprawling but remote
mountain village of some 15,000 people,
not far from Fez.
He
said he was sitting with about 15
neighbours, and they all had the same
story to tell. They had studied the
circulating photograph of Madeleine
carefully, and felt sure that this was
the strange new girl they had seen in
the village recently. She lived on the
outskirts of the community with a Berber
woman, aged around 40, and a teenage
girl, aged around 15.
Listening to the man, Naoual's pulse
quickened. Everything seemed to tally.
Naoual
says she passed the new information to
Jiminez, but she is not sure whether he
found time to go to the village because,
a couple of days later, he was back in
Spain. She also informed the police in
Fez, who have done nothing.
So I
followed the trail through the mountains
to the village. Its people are mainly
poor farmers and small traders. The
village is too poor to have its own
police station, which would obviously
have advantages for anyone hiding an
abducted child.
But
when I spoke to the schools inspector
who had alerted Naoual, he remained
convinced that the little girl in the
photo and the child who lives near the
village are one and the same. Currently
visiting relatives 400 miles away, he is
returning home soon and is confident he
can prove what he says.
Naoual, for her part, believes Madeleine
is languishing somewhere in the country
of her birth.
"I
know some people will think it sounds
fantastic when you start talking about
little European blonde girls being
kidnapped, taken to Morocco and sold,"
she says. "But I am Moroccan and I think
it is totally feasible.
"It's
a very secretive country and there are a
lot of girls who are stolen and held in
cellars, to be sold for sex.
"I
don't want a penny for my story. All I
want is for Madeleine to be found safe
and well, and reunited with her parents.
She is in Morocco. I'm sure of it."
Tonight, near their Leicester home, Kate
and Gerry McCann will be attending a
special church service, timed as
precisely as possible to mark the
moment, six months ago, that Maddie went
missing.
Meanwhile, my search in the mountains
will continue. In my heart, I fear that
it will prove fruitless.
Wouldn't it be wonderful, though, to
find a little blonde English girl with a
tell-tale flash in her eye?
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- Helene, France, 2/11/2007 22:45