(This blog is the successor to "Old" Dreams and Daemons on a different site).

I've resisted the urge to comment on recent developments in the Maddie McCann disappearance. That's maybe the result of having my initial reservations about the abduction claim/theory removed from My Telegraph by the Telegraph's lawyers.

They were a response to Simon Coulter's more candid speculation on what may have happened. That too was removed, although I kept a copy, which I'm ready to publish here when the time is ripe.

But there's a sideshow to all of this, namely the continuing arguido status of Robert Murat, ie as an official suspect under Portugese law. His position, or that of anyone with the misfortune to be so labelled, is highly invidious. He is not permitted to talk to the media, whilst the media are under no such constraints, publishing all kinds of damning speculation as to what might be on his computer, or buried in his mother's back garden etc. If, as we are now told, the Portugese police are feeding their own media with leaked information of doubtful quality or veracity, then the setting up of UK citizen as a fall guy is quite obnoxious.

Why is it that are our own media, with few exceptions (notably Camilla Cavendish in the Times)have been so quiet about Murat's predicament ? Is it because one of the UK press pack had a hunch, and fingered him in the immediate aftermath of Maddie's disappearance ?

I for one did not appreciate that this type of arguido law still existed in a modern European state, and wonder why it is that while British laws are continually overuled by the European Court of Human Rights, the Portugese are allowed to operate what is effectively a "guilty till proven innocent" kind of system without legal challenge.

I have no strong views on whether Robert Murat is entirely innocent, or whether he had some part to play in Maddie's disappearance, whether that poor child was alive or deceased. That is for the police and courts finally to decide. My sole concern is what that continuing arguido status must be doing to his life and that of his family. Time and again we have been told that he is shortly to be cleared, but it fails to happen. Do the Portugese police know something we don't, or is it simply inertia on their part, or, worse still, an exercise in face-saving ? Will his arguido status finally be lifted on the kind of day that is "good for burying bad news" ?

Here is what I wrote on My Telegraph back in May:

Robert Murat: Trial by journalists

Robert Murat has been released because no evidence has as yet been found against him, despite intensive searches of his property, computer etc over several days. So why did suspicion fall on him in the first place. ?

Look at this link on Sky news and you get the answer:

Journalists at the scene, looking around for a translator, discovered, or were made aware of , Murat living nearby. They then decided that he was being rather too helpful and straightaway, recalling Ian Huntley's behaviour at Soham, tipped off the Portugese police. The rest as they say is history.

Murat says he's being made a scapegoat, and so apparently are his family back in the UK, with press posses on their doorsrteps. That I find truly appalling .

I can only reiterate what others have said: we are seeing trial by media here, and a media to boot that has, as far as we can see, no concrete evidence against this fellow, and are merely showing the suspicious minds that journalists have.

But there's a world of difference between being suspicious and following up with one's own patient, painstaking enquiries, on the one hand, and "fingering" someone to the local police, on the other.

Are we seeing an appalling miscarriage of justice, kangaroo-court style ? I'm not prescient, but my gut feeling is that Robert Murat is the fall guy in all of this for being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and for trying to be too helpful. Welcome to the 21st century.

Posted to My Telegraph by ColinB at 12:00 on 16 May 2007