He also faces charges over the rape of an Irish woman, amongst other offences.ĭespite press reports that charges against Brueckner had been dropped, prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters told the Olive Press last month that a trial had not been cancelled.Ī date has not yet been set for a hearing of the five charges that were levelled at the convicted paedophile, 46, in October last year. He said in an interview on Portuguese television that investigators believed they had found “some facts, some new evidence, not forensic evidence”.Kate and Gerry McCann pose with a computer generated image of how their missing daughter Madeleine might look as a teenīut the finger of suspicion has been pointed at convicted German sex offender Christian Brueckner, who is serving a jail sentence.īrueckner, who spent a lot of time living in Granada as well as the Algarve, was identified as a suspect in the case in June 2020, with German prosecutors painstakingly building a case against him. Wolters said in May that new evidence had been found against the prime suspect in Madeleine’s disappearance. They include three cases of rape and two cases of child molestation, the most recent in 2017 when Brückner is alleged to have exposed himself in front of a group of children. He has been serving a sentence in Oldenburg prison in northern Germany for raping a woman in 2005 in the same area of the Algarve region of Portugal where Madeleine went missing.īrückner has previously denied any involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance.Ĭhristian Wolters, the state prosecutor in Braunschweig, is investigating Brückner for five separate alleged offences. In April, Portuguese authorities made Brückner an arguido – a “named suspect” or “formal suspect” – who is treated by Portuguese police as more than a witness but has not been arrested or charged.
Unlike Portugal, Germany does not have a statute of limitations for murder. Nevertheless, British officers continue to treat it as a missing person’s case. German police said in June 2020 that she was assumed dead and that Brückner was probably responsible for her disappearance. Madeleine was three when she went missing from her family’s holiday flat in Praia da Luz on, while her parents dined at a nearby tapas restaurant, triggering a huge missing person investigation. The videotapes that show these acts have never been found, and the identity of the two females described by the witnesses remain unknown.īrückner is also charged with forcing a 14-year-old girl to engage in sexual activity, and of exposing himself to girls aged 10 and 11 on two separate occasions 10 years apart, in Faro in April 2007 and in São Bartolomeu de Messines in June 2017. Two of the charges are based on the testimonies of two former acquaintances of Brückner, who described having seen the sexual assaults on a video camera and videotapes they stole from his house in 2006. “My mind was blown when I read how he had attacked a woman in 2005, both the tactics and the methods he used, how well he had planned it out,” she told the Guardian. Hazel Behan, an Irish citizen, in 2020 asked UK detectives working on Madeleine’s disappearance to review her attack, after learning that a new suspect in the then three-year-old’s abduction had been convicted of a sexual assault with similarities to her own experience. In both cases the accused had gained access to their apartments, tied up and lashed the women with a whip, and filmed the assault with a video camera he had brought along. The new charges against him include the rapes of an unidentified woman aged between 70 and 80 and of a 20-year-old Irish woman. “Specifically, the accused is charged with three offences of aggravated rape and two offences of sexual abuse of children,” the prosecutor’s office added. A statement released on Tuesday by the prosecutor’s office in the German city of Braunschweig said: “The accused is the same person against whom charges were brought in connection with the disappearance of the then three-year-old British girl Madeleine Beth McCann.”
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