Brazil’s Isabella echoes McCann tragedy

Isabella, Isabella, Isabella... there's been only one name on the lips of Brazilians this past month and it's that of an innocent five-year-old girl half-strangled and then flung to her death from the sixth floor of an apartment block in Sao Paulo.

Who killed Isabella? After an initial wave of shock and sympathy, police unexpectedly named her own father and stepmother as prime suspects. There were blood traces in the child's bedroom and in the couple's car. Nine days later they were released for lack of evidence, but it hasn't stopped Brazilians baying for justice.

Isabella Nardoni's face beams out from the cover of every magazine, every newspaper, every day. One TV channel has boasted of having 15 reporter-camera teams set aside for Isabella developments. New clues have been systematically leaked by police to the press.

Research shows 98 per cent of Brazilians are aware of the girl's death, the highest register of any subject in the history of poll-making here. Or, to put it another way, more than Brazil winning the World Cup. In short, although Isabella is dead and not disappeared, it's Madeleine McCann all over again.

Brazil is, of course, one of the most violent countries in the world. There have been 82 murders, on average, every day for the past 20 years. But 'Little Isabella' was not from the favelas (or slums): she was a pretty five-year-old lawyer's daughter.

"Brazilians have become used to violence in the favelas, but when it happens in a middle-class, normal-looking family, it gets a lot of attention," said Gabriella Dorlhiac, a journalist on the Estado de S. Paulo, one of the newspapers that has contributed to the wall-to-wall coverage.

The father, Alexandre Nardoni, 29, and the stepmother, Anna Carolina Jatoba, 24, who met while studying law at university, claim an unknown third party killed Isabella while they were in the basement garage. In an interview with the Globo TV network, they pleaded their innocence. "Isabella was our treasure. God is our only witness," said Alexandre. Meanwhile Isabella's mother, also called Ana Carolina, was appearing on Evangelical TV being comforted by a priest.

During Nardoni and Jatoba's (pictured right) short period of imprisonment, thousands of vigilantes tried to break into the police station chanting 'Happy Birthday, Isabella' on the day she would have turned six. Since their release, the couple say they've been unable to venture outside for fear of mobs and the media. Last weekend President Lula da Silva, on a visit to Africa, was forced to quell the continued fever, saying the couple had "already been condemned" by the media.

On Sunday, beamed live on TV, Brazilian police mounted a seven-hour reconstruction of the murder. A nation addicted to telenovelas and soap operas was transfixed. The climax was the pushing of a life-like Isabella doll through the window and protective mesh of the sixth floor of 'Residencial London'.

Twists and turns are drip-fed daily. Testimony from neighbours includes the claim that the couple's three-year-old son was heard yelling, 'Stop, daddy, stop.'

And, in a significant reminder of the McCann case, as the first anniversary of Madeleine's disappearance approaches, there have been allegations of police incompetence. Antonio Nardoni, Isabella's grandfather and a lawyer, claims that police visited the apartment the day after the crime and helped themselves to Coca-Cola in the fridge, ate the kid's Easter eggs, sat on the sofa and watched TV - all before the forensic teams arrived. ·