I previously wrote about the U.K.’s Express Newspapers making prominent apologies to Kate and Gerry McCann. Now the papers have stepped up with another round of apologies, including this one from the Express:
IN articles published between July and December last year we suggested that the holiday companions of Kate and Gerry McCann might have covered up the true facts concerning Madeleine McCann’s disappearance and/or misled the authorities investigating her disappearance.
We also reported speculation that one member of the group, Dr Russell O’Brien, was suspected of involvement with Madeleine’s abduction. We now accept that these suggestions should never have been made and were completely untrue. We apologise to Jane Tanner, Russell O’Brien, Fiona Payne, David Payne, Matthew Oldfield, Rachael Oldfield and Diane Webster to whom we have agreed to pay substantial damages which they will be donating to the Find Madeleine Fund.
The Guardian has some background:
The Daily Express and Daily Star have today printed apologies to the so-called “tapas seven” friends of Kate and Gerry McCann as part of a legal settlement.
Daily Express - ‘tapas seven’ apology Daily Express: ran apology on page 5
Today’s apologies, on page 5 of the Daily Express and page 3 of the Daily Star, come ahead of a statement about the “tapas seven” settlement to be read out in the high court in London at 10.30am.
Richard Desmond’s Express Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Express and Daily Star, will also pay the group £375,000 in damages, according to a report yesterday by the Sky News crime correspondent, Martin Brunt. The money will be donated to the Find Madeleine Fund.
Under the headline “Tapas seven - an apology”, both papers apologised for publishing “completely untrue” suggestions that the friends may have lied about the case …
More details of the holiday companions’ settlement with Express Newspapers are expected to be outlined in the high court statement before Mr Justice Eady.
The legal action, undertaken for the “tapas seven” by law firm Carter-Ruck, follows big payouts by British papers to the McCanns and to Robert Murat.
In July, Murat accepted more than £600,000 in damages from 11 British newspapers after he was libelled in more than 100 articles.
The Express Newspapers-owned Daily Express, Sunday Express and Daily Star; Associated Newspapers’ Daily Mail, Evening Standard, and Metro; Mirror Group Newspapers’ Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror and Scottish Daily Record; and News Group’s Sun and News of the World acknowledged that the stories they had run about Murat over nine months were entirely untrue and should never have been printed.
In March, Kate and Gerry McCann accepted £550,000 from Express Newspapers after the Daily and Sunday Express, the Daily Star and Daily Star Sunday ran numerous defamatory articles after their daughter Madeleine disappeared from the Praia da Luz resort in Portugal on May 3, 2007.
A PHOTOGRAPH caption in earlier editions of yesterday’s Scottish Daily Express (Tragedy as girl, 16, is found dead in her bed after party) incorrectly stated that the picture was of Jennifer Paul, 16, from Edinburgh.
On May 25 2006 we reported that Lynett Burgess has been cleared of indecent exposure for sunbathing nude in her garden. We stated that her neighbour, Mr Jones, had taken a video of her in her garden which was given to the police. We have been asked to make clear that Mr Jones’s builder in fact took the pictures when Ms Burgess was on Mr Jones’s drive.
Our agency-based report on the unsuccessful prosecution of Lynette Burgess for indecent exposure (25 May) suggested that she had been filmed sunbathing naked in her garden by a neighbour, Morien Jones. In fact the film, taken on police advice by Mr Jones’s builder in the context of possible court proceedings, showed Ms Burgess walking naked on the driveway at the front of Mr Jones’s property.
