Kate McCann Considers Child Welfare Career

Kate McCann intends to quit her job as a GP and take up a new career in child welfare, it has emerged.

Mrs McCann, who remains an official suspect in the disappearance of her daughter Madeleine, has told friends she wants to help other children when she eventually feels strong enough to return to work.

One possibility is that she will set up a charity to raise awareness of the extent of child abductions across Europe and help parents and children who suffer such an ordeal.

However Mrs McCann, 39, has made it clear she could not go back to work until she knows what happened to four-year-old Madeleine on May 3, when she disappeared from the family’s holiday apartment in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz.

Madeleine’s father Gerry McCann, 39, is said to be preparing to return to work as a consultant cardiologist at Glenfield Hospital in Leicester before Christmas.

Friends say he is keen to restore some sort of normality to the family’s life for the sake of the couple’s two-year-old twins Sean and Amelie and for the sake of the family finances.

But his wife, who worked two days a week as a locum GP, has told her family she sees her future lying in charity work.

“She is not of a mind to go back into medicine,” said one friend. “She hasn’t ruled it out entirely but she doesn’t feel it would appeal to her any more.”

The McCanns’ spokesman Clarence Mitchell said: “No decision has been taken on Kate’s future yet. She hasn’t approached, or been approached by, any children’s charities.”

advertisementThe news came as Portugal’s attorney general gave an outspoken interview in which he likened the country’s investigative system to a medieval fiefdom and claimed his own mobile phone was being tapped.

Fernando Jose Pinto Monteiro said the Ministerio Publico – the equivalent of the Crown Prosecution Service – is: “A feudal power. There is a count, a viscount, a marquis and a duke.”

Asked by a Portuguese newspaper if he could assure the public the police were not “freewheeling” he said: “No, I can’t guarantee that. I don’t have control over them.”

The McCanns and their friends who were on holiday with them have said in the past that they fear their phones have been bugged by Portuguese police, and Mr Monteiro said: “I think phone tapping in Portugal is done too much. I think my mobile is being tapped. At times it makes very strange noises.”