Polish woman most likely not Madeleine McCann, analysis finds
A Polish woman’s claims she’s missing Madeleine McCann has copped a major blow from the results of extensive AI analysis of her photos.
The Polish woman who believes she’s missing British girl Madeleine McCann is most likely not the girl who was abducted in Portugal in 2007, a facial recognition analysis has concluded.
Julia Faustyna, who also goes by the name Julia Wendell and Julia Wandelt, failed to match photos of McCann in a facial recognition comparison of the two.
Swiss AI company Ava-X ran photos of Faustyna and McCann through its Iris facial recognition software shortly after her story went viral and gripped the world, Swiss newspaper Blick reported.
“It’s practically impossible for the young Pole to be Maddie,” Ava-X’s co-founder Christian Fehrlin told the publication.
Fehrlin noted that while childhood and adult photos of Faustyna matched — a comparison between photos of McCann and Faustyna did not.
“That scored a hit,” Fehrlin said. “However, when we did the same with Maddie’s picture, no match could be found.”
Ava-X’s technology breaks the image of a person’s face up into different parts and then checks if the parts match any other images in other databases, Fehrlin explained.
Faustyna, 21, claimed she first heard she was the missing girl from her grandmother a few months ago, and has tried to prove her case by sharing physical similarities between herself and McCann — including a distinct brown smudge on each girl’s right iris.
In Maddie’s case, this was caused by an extremely rare condition coloboma in her right eye, which police had hoped for years would help identify her.
“I have similar eyes, shape of face, ears, lips, I had the gap between the teeths [as Madeleine],” Faustyna wrote in one Instagram post, with side-by-side photos of herself and the kidnapped child, who is presumed dead.
Faustyna also claimed to have very few childhood memories and says she is suspicious of her parents because she has never seen a photo of her mother pregnant.
The missing girl’s parents, Gerry and Kate McCann, agreed to take a DNA test to determine if they are related.
Faustyna submitted samples for three different forensic examinations recently that will outline her DNA sequence, along with a 23andMe-style genetic test to establish her ancestry, private investigator Dr Fia Johansson told RadarOnline.com.
Internet users have also speculated that Faustyna could be Swiss girl Livia Schepp, who disappeared in 2011 with her twin Alessia, aged six.
“Julia is very open to the idea she may indeed be another missing child and they are hoping to carry out a DNA test with her family,” Dr Johansson recently told The Sun.
Meanwhile Faustyna’s family are reportedly distraught by their daughter’s claims.
“For us as a family it is obvious that Julia is our daughter, granddaughter, sister, niece, cousin and step niece,” the family said in a statement issued to a Polish missing persons website.
“We have memories, we have pictures. Julia also has these photos, because she took them from the family home with the birth certificate, as well as numerous hospital discharges.”
German investigators believe Maddie was killed by sex predator Christian Brueckner.
He was charged with three counts of aggravated rape and two counts of sexual abuse of children in October last year.
The alleged offences span a 17-year period between 2000 and 2017, The Sun reported at the time. He has not been charged with any offence in relation to Maddie’s disappearance.
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