COURTS: Kate and Gerry McCann have NOT been proven innocent in Maddie’s disappearance

The parents of Madeleine McCann, who disappeared from Praia da Luz in Portugal in 2007, are facing fresh legal difficulties.

Last month, Gerry and Kate McCann lost their Supreme Court appeal against Gonçalo Amaral, a former Portuguese police inspector, who claimed in his book The Truth of the Lie that the couple were responsible for their daughter's disappearance. Now, Portugal's Supreme Court has ruled that neither parent has formally been proved innocent for Maddie's disappearance, and can't be assumed to be so. The couple were ruled out as 'arguidos' (formal suspects) in 2008, but judges have stressed that this does not equate to a ruling of innocence. The 76-page ruling states:

"It should not be said that the appellants were cleared via the ruling announcing the archiving of the criminal case. That ruling was not made in virtue of Portugal’s Public Prosecution Service having acquired the conviction that the appellants hadn’t committed a crime. The archiving of the case was determined by the fact that public prosecutors hadn't managed to obtain sufficient evidence of the practice of crimes by the appellants. It doesn't therefore seem acceptable that the ruling, based on the insufficiency of evidence, should be equated to proof of innocence."