The First Photo - part 3: ROB.

Russell O’Brien does not mention printing photographs in either his statement of the 4th or that of the 11th of May 2007.

The rogatory of April the 8th was repeated on April the 10th: 

(see  http://www.mccannfiles.com/id221.html)

From McCannfiles.com:

‘Russell James O'Brien was questioned on the 8th of April from 9.55 a.m. until 8.18 p.m., divided into 5 distinct time periods (9.55 – 11.30 a.m., 12.01 – 12.50 a.m., 2.06 – 3.55 p.m., 5.15 – 6.56 p.m., and 7.37 – 8.18 p.m.). 

Officially, all the video images of this day were rendered useless because the video camera didn't work… which means that Enderby police wants us to believe that, even during pauses, they never verified if the interrogation was being recorded correctly. (See mccannfiles.com for  a copy of document that disproves this, the checks were done, so the interview must have been repeated for another reason altogether.)

This was the official version, the one that was offered to the Portuguese authorities. Nevertheless, the truth of facts is different, and Russell O'Brien was questioned again on the 10th of April; this time the camera worked’.(unquote)

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Rogatory Interview April 10 2008. This is rather confusing as there are two sets of questions about the photographs  in different parts of this interview.

This is from Part II of the interview.

1578 [..] ’And a female member of staff possibly from MARK WARNER’?”

Reply    “Yeah, she was certainly, yeah, she was, she was English, you know, clearly not a, not a local.  Erm, next it says ‘We tried to find a picture of Madeleine’, I mean, it wasn’t so much struggling to get the picture, it was struggling to find the means of printing it.  We had the cam, we had Kate’s camera, erm, the, what we were trying to do is find a picture that actually gave a good likeness, rather than just being any old shot it actually had, you know, a close-up of her, of her face.  There were a lot of pictures on the camera but they were, you know, just at home and on, you know, in profile and things like that”.

1578    “Yes”.

Reply    “So we had, we”.

1578    “So to the words ‘we were struggling’, ‘but we were struggling’ need to be removed?”

Reply    “Erm, yeah, ‘we tried to find’, I think, it’s fairly irrelevant, I think, you know”.

1578    “So?”

Reply    “’We were trying to find a picture but we’, you know, delete ‘but we were struggling’.  ‘Kate checked the camera’. [..] the main thing here was, erm, ‘We were searching for a printer and Kat, one of the Nannies, said she had a printer’.  I’m pretty sure it was Kat.  So this paragraph’s quite”.

1578    “So we keep in ‘We couldn’t print it off’?”

Reply    “’We needed to print it off’ that, that was the sticking issue, we had pictures but we needed to get in somewhere to print them and I think people had asked at, at, at the reception down at Ocean Club”.

1578    “So the pictures of Madeleine?”

Reply    “On a digital camera”.

1578    “That were printed off?”

Reply    “Yeah”.

1578    “Came from Kate’s camera”.

Reply    “From Kate’s camera as far as I can remember, yeah.  And the main issue was trying to find somewhere to print it”.

1578    “What about if we say ‘Kate checked her camera and found some pictures’?”

Reply    “Yeah, yeah, or ‘Kate’s camera was checked’, I don’t think Kate was in no, in no state whatsoever to check her camera”.

1578    “Okay.  So ‘We tried to find a picture of Madeleine’?”

Reply    “Yeah”.

1578    “’Kate’s camera was checked’?”

Reply    “Umm, ‘And Kat or one of the other Nannies went to their flat to retrieve a printer or something that would connect to a printer and then the pictures were printed in the office off the small reception portal’, there’s a little office in there”.

1578    “Okay.  But ‘Kate or one of the Nannies’?”

Reply    “Yeah, ‘Kat or one of the Nannies’, I mean, Kat was there and Leanne was there, but whether it was actually their printer or lead, I’m not sure. 

Now we get to Part III of the same interview: 

1578    “Did you have any photo of Madeleine in your possession”?

Reply    “Erm we got a photo of Madeleine later on but this is two hours later, erm”.

1578    “So who gave it to you”?

Reply    “Okay well certain, I’m not quite sure what the, the initial, the question made it sound like whoever had one in our possession anyway, I didn’t, erm we got a, we erm, after a portion of my searches, we got hold of erm Kate’s camera, err looked through the digital cam to try and find a picture of Madeleine reasonably recently, reasonably face on and, and with her being the main, the main character on the photograph, erm clearly that that was going through, there were quite a few pictures that were not ideal, so we, we went through those, err and then printed that off, erm all of this taking a reasonable amount of time to try and get hold of equipment and have offices opened and etc., etc”.

1578    “Okay.  What kind of photo was it”?

Reply    “The, it was a, it was a photo of err, it was the one that was being circulated in the, in the days immediately afterwards, I’ve seen so many photographs of her, of Madeleine since, I think it was a photograph that had been taken of her and a relatively number of weeks before and I think with a slightly different, slightly longer hair, erm but it was, it was a fa, it was a fa, it was a relatively full on sort of face on photograph, err and it was printed on a standard size erm four by six err inch, as you know, using the equipment that the people had and we ran off a number of copies of this, erm and several I think were given to the, the GNR”.

1578    “I was going to ask you the next question”.

Reply    “Sorry”.

1578    “Was, who did you give the photo to”?

Reply    “Yeah well I think the ones that I had, I took, you know cos obviously they were printing out, you know they were slow you know, we really wanted to get them to the Police fairly quickly, so I took the first couple of copies and took those round to, I think the GNR staff, I presume they were the origin, you know original uniformed Officers, it wasn’t the PJ, it was well before the PJ arrived, erm there were other copies printed off which I don’t know where they got to but I know that Mark WARNER, somebody in Mark WARNER made a poster, or at least an A4 err saying that there’d been, you know, there’d been a, err an abduction and that Madeleine was missing and that was circulated around the next morning, so somebody had, had, had that photograph and used it for that poster but I took, I don’t know two or three copies maybe and gave them to the Police.  I actually think ultimately there may have been more copies printed off and somebody else gave even more copies to them as well, err and I think some of the other copies were shown, were just shown to people around who were going on the searches but erm personally”.

1578    “The copies that you had, you only gave to the Police”?

Reply    “I gave it to the Police, just to the Police”.

Unquote. 

So what we have here: 

They had Kate’s camera. It was checked by Kate(8/4),  but by 10/4 (interview repeated)   Kate did not check her camera.

'we went through those, err and then printed that off,' doesn't give much information, neither does :“From Kate’s camera as far as I can remember. 

In effect ROB does not commit himself to anything, not the exact camera and specifically not who selected the photograph or where the USB stick came from. He even leaves the printing aside here. 

They went through a lot of unsuitable pictures before deciding on one.  This picture shows her with ‘longer’ hair. Longer than when? The polka dot photo shows her with hair shorter than in most photos. 

In part II of his statement there were a lot of pictures  ‘just at home or in profile’, no mention of unsuitable holiday photos. 

In part III this has disappeared and we have ‘pictures that were not ideal.’

Nowhere do we hear that Kate chose the picture, which is surely what one would expect. 

His  account does not corroborate that of Ms. Tierney. At no time does he go to Ms. T's desk and ask if she has a USB stick reader. We get the impression that there are a number of nannies floating around and he  decides on Kat, who incidentally looks nothing like Ms. Tierney. 

Most of all there is a gap in the narrative between finding the suitable photograph and printing it off. There is in effect no continuous chain of events where otherwise we are treated to more detail than necessary. The USB key appears in Tierney’s statement, but not in ROB’s. He does however mention a USB key the group used to store an extended timeline on a borrowed laptop at least a week later so he knows perfectly well what it is. 

From the same interview, part III: 

I turned up on my second interview and presented them with the, with the stick  [..] it’s been, it was, it was,it was really quite hard for, you know to hear that, or at least hear the fact be[..] and we were transparent in that we gave this to the Police at the very next meeting, there was no attempt to conceal this and have this as a hidden document that we were all reading from’. 

However there is no mention of a USB stick by the PJ. Instead we have this: 

A 3 typed pages timeline (Vol IV. p. 887 - 889) were received by the PJ on May 10, through the services of the British Consulate. 

Vol IV p 886: Attached: 

On this date, I attached to these official papers 3 computer printed pages, relating to the description of the events that have been collectively prepared by the nine people of the group in question, that was delivered to this Police Officer by the British Liaison Official before the  of re-questioning of those same people.

Portimao, 10 May 2007. Inspector M.P. 

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So two versions in the same interview of how the photo was found and printed and no mention of a USB stick by ROB at all. The only USB stick in the interview has nothing to do with the photograph and appears not to have been given to the PJ as stated. 

From the book 'madeleine'. chapter 5:
Russell later asked us for our digital photos of Madeleine and went off somewhere with our camera.

That is no help either, as we can see in the technical details in part one. The  Canon  could not  have printed that photograph as the aspect ratio is wrong.