McCann: Stop reporting speculation

The father of Madeleine McCann said today that he wished the level of coverage given to his daughter's abduction would calm down, so his family's campaign to find the abducted four-year-old could continue.

Speaking to Newsnight presenter Kirsty Walk at MGEITF today, McCann talked about the helplessness that he and wife Kate felt in the first few hours of Madeleine's disappearance while on holiday in Portugal, and that the subsequent media attention had surprised them.

He explained how it was contacts of friends and family that had managed to get many high profile people - including footballers Ronaldo and David Beckham, and even the Pope - to lend support for the campaign.

But McCann surprised many in the room by saying he wished in hindsight that there had been less media coverage, and hoped that the level of reporting would die down so the McCann's could get back to their campaign to find their daughter. He also hit out at the "wild speculation" that had filled many of the column inches written about the McCann's.

"Many things in the coverage of this story are absolute speculation that is being presented as fact...before this, I suppose I believed that most of things in newspapers were true, or what you saw on TV had some basis in fact."

"I feel there is a responsibility for journalists to present facts, or make it very, very clear when it is speculation," McCann added.

Though McCann said he had found interviews and the attention from the press "scary," it was nothing compared to what the couple had gone through with the abduction of their daughter.

"When we did things we would not normally be comfortable with, we compared it with how we felt that [first] night," he said.