On the same day as Nora Quoirin’s funeral at St Brigid’s Church, Derryvolgie Avenue, Belfast, two news items caught my attention. The first was another fundraiser, ostensibly by the Lucie Blackman Trust to help fund the launch of their services for other Irish families in similar circumstances, in Nóra’s memory.

In other words, donate to “help fund the launch of the Lucie Blackman Trust…” We don’t even know the exact circumstances of what happened to Nora, but the Trust are confidently asking for donations to help other families in similar circumstances.

Did the Lucie Blackman Trust do anything to actually help find Nora, or assist in the investigation whatsoever? What they did do was act as spokesman; they were responsible for spreading the dubious abductor story, which put the Quoirin family at cross purposes with the police who were trying to look for their daughter.

A strong argument can be made that if it wasn’t for the interference and pressure of foreign media and bogus McCann-inspired abductor yarn, the searches would have remained nearer the resort where Nora was ultimately found. If that happened Nora may have been found sooner, and found alive. Nora didn’t die the day she went missing, she starved to death over a period of a week, more than enough time for the people on the ground searching for her to find her.

By splitting up the search resources into those searching for a Wandering Nora and those searching for an Abducted Nora, this may be why Nora wasn’t found until it was too late.

Alternatively, one may say there are still unanswered questions, say as whether Nora was moved to where she was found by some invisible entity or phantasm. But if there are lingering questions, no one seems interested in answering them any longer. The family have moved on, the media have moved on [except to criticize this site for daring to investigate beyond the media narrative], and apparently even the Trust have moved on in terms of fundraising for other families in so-called similar circumstances.

At the official Nora Quoirin memorial page, one has to pay £14 in order to leave a “note of sympathy”.

The other story that caught my attention was one conflating the discovery of of a missing Russian child with her parents, after a 20 year disappearance. Written by the McCann-scribe and arch apologist Tracey Kandohla, the story pretends there is any similarity between the two cases, and further, that the McCanns have every reason to hope Madeleine is still alive and well out there. In reality, the Yulia Gorina’s disappearance is nothing like Madeleine’s.

“Yulia was almost the same age as little Maddie when she mysteriously vanished from a train travelling from the Belarus capital of Minsk 20 years ago as her dad slept. She somehow ended up more than 550 miles away in Ryazan, in neighbouring Russia, three weeks later, where cops were unable to trace her parents and gave her up for adoption.”

Yulia didn’t “somehow end up 550 miles away”. She was on a train. That’s how she got to where she was found. While her father slept during the 60-mile train journey from Minsk to Asipovichy, Yulia wandered off [probably elsewhere in the train]. What’s so mysterious about that?

According to the media “it remains unclear how Yulia got from Asipovichy to Ryazan”.

It’s not unclear at all. Ryazan is a few miles east of Moscow, the Russian capital. Trains tend to radiate outward from large urban centres, and after terminating at smaller cities and towns, they invariably return to these same centres. That’s what happened to Yulia.

Yulia was found on a railway siding, and ended up growing up there. She still lives there today. The media use the words “lost” to describe her, not kidnapped, or abducted. And where was Yulia reconciled with her family? At a police station, the one place where the McCanns didn’t want to be in Portugal. And when they were summoned, they refused to answer questions put to them.

Given the innocent circumstances of  Yulia Gorina, her parents had every reason to hope that she was alive. There was no reason to think she’d been taken, and rather than that being their first thought, it was more likely their last.

Interestingly, though the parents searched frantically for their child, the parents were widely believed to have killed their little girl, although charges were never filed against them. Naturally Kandohla leaves this out of her version of the story. It’s often the parents who are suspected in exactly these sort of disappearances because it usually is. And in this case, the father could be faulted for neglect.

Ultimately Yulia wasn’t taken by a sinister pedophile ring or predator abductor. She was found – a little girl lost – by local police. When no parents could be found in the area, she was given up for adoption.  Guess how she was reunited with her family? Her boyfriend did a simple internet search.

The McCann case is very different, and any sensible person [and sensible media] would know there is more evidence suggesting Madeleine is dead, and died in apartment 5A more than 12 years ago, than that she’s alive. If she is alive, and safe, she could do an internet search too, assuming she somehow missed the world’s largest manhunt for a person, and associated media coverage. So why doesn’t she?

The timing of Kandohla’s article is very interesting however. It nicely shifts the narrative away from Nora on the important day in which media is likely to gravitate back to the case. And the McCanns know this. So, what better than on the day of Nora’s funeral, the McCanns have a “boost” that their daughter is still alive.  How absurd!

While Nora was missing and that case was highly-publicised, the media and the McCann cohorts flocked to the honey pot of a sensational, high-profile story. Money can be made through the cottage industries of fundraising, so-called hero cops offering their advice on what’s “typical” in these classic McCann-like abduction scenarios, and various vested interests jostling for position. But as soon as it turned out Nora was dead, all these opportunists [as well as the British media as whole] dropped the story like a hot potato.

One of the reasons I wanted to write about the Quoirin case was to debunk the lunacy of the McCann saga infecting this case. One could see a mile off that sticky taping abductor over this case was going to all end in tears, and that’s what happened – the disastrous results of this case were predictable and preventable.

The McCann case isn’t the proper or professional way to investigate a missing persons case, it’s not a blueprint how to deal with a missing child situation, it’s precisely how not to report on or investigate one.

Overall the media coverage of the Quoirin case was biased, misinformed and flat-out barking up the wrong tree. In this sense, the media are somewhat culpable for where Nora and her family find themselves on the tragic day her remains are finally laid to rest. Will any lessons be learned from this? And, at the end of the day, who is responsible for infecting the narrative the way this one was?