Madeleine McCann: 'Catalog of errors' let Christian Brückner walk free in child pornography case, says expert
The prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann walked free four years ago because of a “catalog of errors” from the authorities, it has been reported. Christian Brückner, a 43-year-old convicted German pedophile, was named in June as the suspect in the 13-year-old case of Madeleine, who was last seen on the evening of May 3, 2007, in a holiday apartment at a resort in Praia da Luz in the Algarve region of Portugal.
Brückner is currently behind bars in Kiel prison, Schleswig-Holstein after he was jailed on drug-related offenses in 2018 but should have been incarcerated earlier over child pornography, according to the Mirror. Those illicit photos were said to be taken after he assaulted the five-year-old daughter of a former girlfriend in a public park in Braunschweig, northern Germany. When authorities raided his flat, they seized a laptop and other devices on which they found the disturbing photographs of him abusing the victim. While Christian Brückner was reportedly acquitted of his charges, he was allowed to walk free despite a higher court ordering him to be held until a retrial.
Brückner subsequently fled to the Algarve region in Portugal, where he had been living intermittently since the 90s and had a record of break-ins at hotels and dealing drugs. While German authorities issued an EU-wide warrant for his arrest, it took Portuguese officials another four years to capture him after they received reports that he had exposed himself to children at a park about 40 miles from Praia da Luz.
He was then extradited to Germany and sentenced to 15 months behind bars in March 2017. “I can confirm that there was the child abuse case," said Thomas Klinge, the Chief Prosecutor in Hanover. "Christian B was sentenced in 2017 for one year and three months."
A German legal expert told that if errors had not been made, the 43-year-old would have been behind bars sooner and that it is not known how many crimes he could have committed while he was free. “This just sums up the catalog of errors surrounding Christian B,” he said of the case. “He simply slipped through the cracks of the system on several occasions.”
After serving the time for child abuse, Brückner was arrested again while living on the streets of Milan in 2018 on a European arrest warrant over the rape of a 72-year-old American woman. He was extradited to Germany again, and one month later, he was convicted of drug dealing in the German resort of Sylt and sentenced to 21 months in prison. In December 2018, a court in Braunschweig convicted him of the rape because DNA from his hair was found in the victim's holiday home and sentenced him to seven years in prison.
Brückner has served two-thirds of his drug sentence and his defense lawyers have appealed his rape conviction on the grounds that his extradition from Italy was illegal. Germany's Federal High Court has not yet ruled on the appeal.