Madeleine McCann: No new announcement on suspect Christian Brückner till 2020 end, say German prosecutors
Prosecutors working on the case of Madeleine McCann, who went missing in May 2007, have said that there will be no major progress in suspect Christian Brückner’s inquiry until the end of this year. Brückner was identified as the prime suspect in the three-year-old’s disappearance in June 2020.
Hans Christian Wolters, the lead prosecutor, spoke with The Sun on Sunday, September 13, and said, “No new announcements will be made until the end of 2020. There is nothing more we can say for the time being and I cannot go into specific details. We have received many tips from Germany and Britain and around the world and we are working through them. That is all I can say.”
Meanwhile, it has been reported that prosecutors are talking to another new witness, who spent time with Brückner in a jail near Hanover in 2018. He is the fourth one who came forward to give a statement into the disappearance that took place 13 years ago.
This comes after MEA WorldWide (MEAWW) previously reported that one of the witnesses who identified Brückner in the abduction case of McCann has said that he thinks the convicted pedophile is guilty and should "stay in jail for a long time". Helge Busching said that he was the one who tipped authorities about Brückner around the 10th anniversary of McCann's disappearance. He claimed that during a 2018 kite festival in Orgiva, Spain, the 43-year-old suspect told him that he was involved in the young girl's abduction from Portugal in 2007. McCann went missing from an apartment while she was vacationing with her family in the town of Praia da Luz, in Portugal’s Algarve region.
Busching, who was arrested in 2017 for smuggling migrants in Greece, said of Brückner, “One word. Guilty." He added, “He is in the right place at the moment and hopefully, he will stay there a long time. I am not allowed to say anything about Brueckner but I hope he stays in jail.''
Brücker is currently serving a jail sentence in Germany for drug offenses and the rape of an American woman in Praia da Luz, Portugal in 2005. Earlier, this year, he got a clean chit in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl, Claudia Ruf, who was killed in 1996. Ruf was abducted while walking a neighbor’s dog in May, 1996. Her body was found two days after she vanished — drenched in petrol and burned partly, 70 km (43 miles) south of the German town of Grevenbroich.
But in August 2020, investigators said that after the DNA tests it has been confirmed that Brücker was not involved in the crime. "After comparing the information obtained, it can be said that Christian B was not in Grevenbroich at the time of the crime in the case of Claudia Ruf. In addition, a DNA comparison is said to have been negative,” a police spokesman said.