Cut back the Madeleine campaign, says Gerry McCann

Gerry McCann confessed he and his wife Kate had to consider getting back to a normal life for the sake of their two-year-old twins Sean and Amelie.

And he said he feared wild speculation in the Portuguese Press was hampering the search. He has had to deny accidentally killing four-year-old Madeleine with an overdose of sedatives.

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"I can see that staying in Portugal may be counter-productive - the difficulty is leaving emotionally as a family of four instead of five," heart specialist Mr McCann said at the Edinburgh TV festival, 114 days after Madeleine vanished from their Algarve apartment while he and Kate were eating at a nearby tapas bar.

He added: "We never predicted the coverage that would be given to Madeleine's disappearance.

"But I do not feel that it is necessary to have her image on the news constantly.

"We cannot sustain that level of interest and Kate and I want to withdraw from the campaign."

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Mr McCann, 39, admitted that the guilt they feel at leaving Madeleine alone will last for ever. But he said there was no evidence that Madeleine was dead, so "for her sake we have got to keep on searching".

He added: "In the first few days and weeks, Kate and I felt that the international Press coverage was vital because a sustained campaign was going to make it difficult for her abductor to do whatever they had in mind when they took her.

"I am a very open person but I do not want to have everything that Kate and I do in our lives scrutinised."

He defended his calm composure when facing the Press and public, saying he and Kate had been instructed to show no emotion by police in case it affected Madeleine's abductor.

He said: "You cannot be an emotional wreck 24 hours a day, you just cannot function like that.

"I have spent a lot of time training to gain my specialist skills and I will ultimately go back to work. I am very confident that whatever happens, our twins will grow up to have a normal and productive life."

The McCanns faced further anguish when a Portuguese newspaper claimed that the scent of a corpse has been discovered on the key of a car they hired five weeks after Madeleine's disappearance.

The paper alleged a sniffer dog brought in by British police detected the traces of the body on the key to a Renault Scenic.

A spokeswoman for the McCanns said: "This is just another example of the wild, unfounded speculation in the media which Kate and Gerry find very unhelpful."