This is what Kate wrote about Amaral.
"Amaral and his chums had evidently been poised to take full advantage of the long-awaited lifting of judicial secrecy. Now they really went to town: we had staged a kidnap, or Madeleine had died in our holiday apartment and we had hidden her body; we had influenced the British police and organized our campaign to mislead investigators into searching for a living child, and so on and so forth. No longer gagged by the law, Amaral was talking more and more openly to journalists and turning up on television chat shows. A friend in the Algarve kept us updated on his activities. It was unpleasant and distressing to hear what he was saying, but we had to know what Madeleine was up against in Portugal. And it was incessant. With the best will in the world, it is hard for anyone to absorb this stuff day in, day out and remain completely objective, especially when it is never challenged or balanced by an alternative viewpoint. It is impossible to convey, particularly to people outside Portugal who were not aware of Amaral’s behaviour, just how difficult this smear campaign was both to withstand and to counter. And we desperately needed to counter it: we have always believed that the information that can lead us to our daughter is likely to come from Portugal. This is where the crime was committed, after all. Blackening our names was one thing, but if people there were taken in by Amaral’s theories, they were going to think there was no point in looking for Madeleine, or in passing on any information that might be relevant. We are quite sure that Amaral’s posturing has reduced our chances of finding her. Why on earth would a former police officer want to convince the world that a missing child was dead – with no evidence whatsoever to support his claim? The only conclusion we could draw was that he was attempting to justify his actions while in charge of the investigation and at the same time promoting his forthcoming book to cash in on our misfortune. It just beggars belief."
"Later the same month, Amaral was given an eighteen-month suspended prison sentence in connection with a case in which three of his officers were accused of torture. The mother and uncle of another missing child – eight-year-old Joana Cipriano, who had disappeared in 2004 from a village seven miles from Praia da Luz – had been imprisoned for her murder, although no body has ever been found. They claimed they had been tortured into confessing (the police maintained that Sra Cipriano had fallen down the stairs). The officers concerned were cleared but the jury found that Amaral had falsified statements relating to the torture case. His conviction was upheld in the Supreme Court in March 2011. Joana’s mother is still in jail. Falsifying statements? It was difficult to understand why anyone would believe the theories of a police officer found guilty of such malpractice. While coordinating the investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance, Amaral had been an arguido. How on earth had he come to be put in charge of an inquiry into the disappearance of another missing child?"
