Madeleine McCann may still be ALIVE, says German prosecutor in major U-turn: 'There's no evidence she is dead’
After Madeleine McCann's parents urged German prosecutors to show evidence that suggested that their daughter had died, the authorities were forced to take back their previous comment and clarify that there was no forensic evidence to suggest she is dead.
German prosecutor Hans Wolters recently told Mirror: "Because there is no forensic evidence there may be a little bit of hope. We don’t want to kill the hope and because there is no forensic evidence it may be possible. I am surprised by the fact we say or I say Madeleine is dead is so important for the British people." He added that it was "normal" in Germany to assume a murder has taken place in similar cases. And hence, the assertion that Madeleine may have been "killed quickly" was only "personal opinion and speculation," which was not based on facts, he said.
German prosecutors said on June 4 that they were currently treating the case as a murder investigation. However, Operation Grange, an investigative review by London's Metropolitan Police Service into the circumstances of the disappearance of then three-year-old Madeleine, still considers the case a missing person inquiry because there is no "definitive evidence whether the girl is alive or dead".
13 years ago, Madeleine had mysteriously disappeared from her parents' vacation apartment at The Ocean Club Resort in Praia da Luz, Portugal on the night of May 3, 2007. At the time, her parents were just 50 meters away from the apartment, dining at a tapas restaurant with several close friends while Madeleine and her twin siblings slept in the house. The child is still missing and Madeleine's disappearance continues to remain the most widely-reported missing person's case in modern history.
Earlier this month, the German police also revealed a new prime suspect in Madeleine's disappearance. The police had announced that Madeliene could be dead, adding that the pedophile suspect, identified as 43-year-old Christian Brückner - a convicted rapist - could be behind her possible murder. They said that they knew how the little girl was killed but had no idea where her body is.
Last week Wolters had said in a press conference, "We think that Madeleine McCann is dead and are appealing for witnesses. The 43-year-old suspect is a convicted sexual predator, already jailed for his crimes against little girls."
A 30-minute phone call placed Brückner in Praia da Luz just one hour before McCann was last seen alive. The investigators believe that Brückner, who is a registered sex offender, used the camper van in the Algarve where he used to live between 1995 and 2007, to abduct McCann. He is also believed to have confessed to kidnapping her on the 10th anniversary of her disappearance in 2017 when he admitted to a friend he had "snatched" the young girl, as they drank in a German bar.
After the recent development, the McCanns' spokesman Clarence Mitchell, had stated that the family continues to hope that Madeleine's alive but they are "realistic" about her fate, according to the Daily Mail. The parents, Gerry and Kate McCann have said that they still have not been given any reason why the German police have deemed the investigation into their daughter's investigation a murder hunt.