Madeleine McCann: German suspect lived with underage girl in Portugal and would often beat her, says neighbor
German investigators probing the disappearance and possible murder of Madeleine McCann, who disappeared 13 years ago, are currently trying to locate former girlfriend of the prime suspect in the case, Christian Brueckner. Brueckner, 43, who is currently in prison for raping a 72-year-old American woman 18 months before the disappearance of then 3-year-old McCann in May 2007 from Praia da Luz, Portugal, reportedly lived with an underage Kosovan girlfriend in a ramshackle house near the site where the little girl vanished.
According to one of Brueckner's former neighbors in Braunschweig, before the former couple moved to Portugal, the suspect was violent towards his girlfriend and would beat her "again and again." The neighbor said that he had no idea what happened to the woman once she moved with Brueckner to Portugal. "He was very bad with women. He had a minor friend who came from Kosovo. He always beat them. Once she even had strangles (sic) on her neck," the neighbor said.
Locating the ex-girlfriend is part of the detectives' efforts to piece together the suspect's whereabouts in the days before and after May 3, 2007 - the night McCann disappeared from the holiday apartment where she was vacationing with her parents Kate and Gerry, and twin siblings Sean and Amelie. The investigators believe that the girlfriend, whose name is not known, had left Brueckner a short while before McCann was allegedly kidnapped from the holiday home.
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 McCann, still considers the case a missing person inquiry because there is no "definitive evidence whether the girl is alive or dead".
A 30-minute phone call placed him in Praia da Luz just one hour before McCann was last seen alive. The investigators believe that Brueckner, 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.
He also reportedly showed the witness a video of raping a woman. Although he was sentenced to seven years in December 2019 for raping a 72-year-old American woman at her home in Praia da Luz, prosecutors are wary of the fact that Brueckner becomes eligible for parole on Sunday, if granted by the country’s Federal Court of Justice.
After renewing efforts to appeal for information on McCann's disappearance, DCI Mark Cranwell, who is leading the Metropolitan Police's Operation Grange investigation said that his department received more than 270 calls and emails by Thursday evening, within hours of the public announcement.
Brueckner was initially extradited from Portugal in 2017 and convicted of drug trafficking. He has a tall criminal record of 17 entries, including accusations of child abuse while he was still a teenager, according to a German magazine, Der Spiegel. Christian Hoppe, from Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), has said that German police have not ruled out a sexual motive behind McCann's disappearance. He said that it was a possibility that the suspect decided to spontaneously kidnap her after breaking into her holiday apartment.