Portuguese police authorities dismissed Tuesday the top investigator in the disappearance of four-year-old Madeleine McCann after he criticized the toddler’s parents and British police, Portuguese media said.

Chief Inspector Goncalo Amaral was reportedly discharged after accusing the British investigators of letting Gerry and Kate McCann manipulate them and divert attention from the case, in which both parents have been declared formal suspects.

“British police have only been working on what the McCann couple wants and suits them,” Amaral told the daily Diario de Noticias.

Amaral was commenting on reports appeared in the British media on an e-mail allegedly sent to Prince Charles. The anonymous message said Madeleine had been kidnapped by a former employee of the Ocean Club holiday apartments, where the McCanns were staying when their daughter vanished on May 3.

Allegedly, the former employee wanted to get back at the company for firing him, but the Portuguese investigator said this report has “no credibility whatsoever for Portuguese police.”

He lashed out at the British police for continuing to follow leads “created and worked over by the McCanns, forgetting that the couple is suspect in the death of their daughter Madeleine.”

“This story of abduction for vengeance is another fact worked over by the McCanns … Ocean Club is in Praia da Luz and not in London,” the former chief of Policia Judiciaria in Portimao said, adding that Portuguese police had investigated all possible leads concerning the club’s employees.

Amaral outlined that the anonymous e-mail “which it is easy to know where it came from” won’t be able to “distract our line of investigation.”

The investigator’s accusations stirred up controversy, one of the Portuguese lawyer of the couple saying he doesn’t want to “comment on any kind of statements of a chauvinist character and a bad tone.”

“It would be useful for all the police forces to collaborate because it is for this kind of thing that the investigation may not make progress,” Carlos Pinto de Abreu told the radio station TSF-Jornal.

Previous to Amaral’s stinging remarks, the chairman of the police trade union Asfic, Carlos Anjos, said the McCanns are “daily announcing new facts” aimed at distracting investigators.

He accused the couple of launching a “campaign to discredit Portuguese police” after investigators suggested that their daughter may have been killed in the apartment and wasn’t abducted.