Joana Isabel Cipriano Guerreiro (born 31 May 1996) was a Portuguese child who disappeared on 12 August 2004 from Figueira, a village near Portimão in Portugal's Algarve region.
[5] One of the two officers who was convicted, Chief Inspector Gonçalo Amaral, led the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, a British girl who went missing in May 2007 from the nearby resort town of Praia da Luz.
Amaral was not present during the alleged assault, but was accused of having covered up for other officers; he was convicted of having falsified police documents in the case and received an eighteen-month suspended sentence.
[6] Several similarities between the Cipriano and McCann cases—both girls vanished without trace within eleven kilometers (seven miles) and three years of each other, both cases had officers who failed to secure the crime scene, both mothers mounted campaigns to find their daughters, and both women were accused of involvement—prompted Cipriano's family to appeal in 2008 for police to investigate whether there was a link between the disappearances.
Five officers, including Gonçalo Amaral, head of the regional Polícia Judiciária (PJ) in Portimão at the time, were charged with a number of offences.
The indictment alleged that several of them had kicked Leonor, hit her with a cardboard tube, put a plastic bag over her head, and made her kneel on glass ashtrays.