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Christian Brückner abused Madeleine McCann and killed her soon after she was kidnapped, says German prosecutor

German authorities have zeroed in on 43-year-old convicted pedophile Christian Brückner as their prime suspect
UPDATED JUN 10, 2020
(Getty Images)
(Getty Images)

Madeleine McCann was likely abused and then killed shortly after she was kidnapped, a German prosecutor said.

Hans Christian Wolters, who is leading the investigation into Christian Brückner, a 43-year-old German pedophile who is the prime suspect in the young girl's disappearance, shared the information as he appealed to the public for more information.

Madeleine was just three-years-old when she disappeared from her bed in her parents' holiday apartment at a resort in Praia de Luz, in the Algarve region of Portugal, on May 3, 2007, and sparked an international manhunt for the suspect.

After 13 years that saw multiple investigations costing millions of dollars make little headway into the case, German authorities announced last week that they had a breakthrough and zeroed in on Brückner as the culprit.

"My private opinion is that he relatively quickly killed the girl, possibly abused her, and then killed her," Wolters told the Times in an interview. "We believe our suspect committed further crimes, especially sexual crimes, in Portugal possibly but also elsewhere like Germany."

(Getty Images)

He declined to state whether Brückner had been suspected of filming this abuse as he had done for some of his other victims but said he feared the 43-year-old may walk free as early as this week.

MEA WorldWide (MEAWW) previously reported that Brückner is currently behind bars in Germany serving a 21-month sentence for dealing drugs, after having initially been arrested while living on the streets of Milan in 2018 on a European warrant over the rape of a 72-year-old American woman.

He had been brought back to Germany and was charged with the rape — which occurred in Praia da Luz just 18 months before Madeleine went missing — in August 2019. One month later, he was convicted of drug dealing in the German resort of Sylt and sentenced to 21 months in prison.

He has now served two-thirds of his drug sentence in Kiel prison, Schleswig-Holstein, and could walk free as Germany's Federal High Court has not yet ruled on his appeal against the seven-year jail term he received for the conviction on rape.

Kate and Gerry McCann hold an age-progressed police image of their daughter (Getty Images)

This has seen German, English, and Portuguese authorities all offer rewards for providing information about Brückner that could help them solve Madeleine's disappearance and keep the 43-year-old behind bars.

"The sooner we get evidence, the better for us to avoid the risk of him ever being released," Wolters said.

Brückner, who has 17 previous convictions to his name, had reportedly worked in restaurants and had a record of break-ins at hotels and dealing drugs in the region where Madeleine's family was vacationing. The night she vanished, police said he had a long telephone conversation from the area near Praia da Luz with a person on a Portuguese cellphone, who they have urged to come forward as a witness.

They also appealed to anyone who might have noticed one of two conspicuous vehicles Brückner used at the time and which they believe was used to kidnap Madeleine. One was a maroon Jaguar XJR 6 with a German license plate that was changed several times, including the day after she disappeared. The other was a white-and-yellow Volkswagen camper van with a Portuguese license plate he is believed to occasionally have lived in but did not own.

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