Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brückner won't face trial for 3-year-old's disappearance, his lawyer claims
The main suspect of the Madeleine McCann will never face trial for the three-year-old’s disappearance case, his lawyer has claimed. German police have repeatedly insisted that Christian Brückner is behind Madeleine’s disappearance and death, claiming to have “concrete evidence’’ the child is not alive. But the 43-year-old’s lawyer, Friedrich Fulscher, has refuted the claims made by the investigators and said: “Where is the evidence? Why has the prosecution not revealed it? There won’t be a trial for my client for Madeleine McCann. I am certain.” Fulscher added that if the case ever goes to trial, his client would face the court “serenely and calmly . . . he has nothing to hide”.
In June, prosecutors claimed they had Brückner’s mobile data that showed him near the Ocean Club apartments in Praia da Luz on Portugal’s Algarve at the time when Madeleine went missing in 2007. The child was on a vacation with her family there when she disappeared.
Brückner 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. He has reportedly appealed at the European Court of Justice against his conviction for raping the 72-year-old woman. Brückner’s lawyers have argued that his current sentence should be overturned because it was not the crime for which he was extradited from Portugal.
Brückner was awarded seven years for attacking the American pensioner in 2005 in Praia da Luz, Portugal. It is the same Portuguese district from where Madeleine went missing two years later on May 3. The lawyers of the accused have now claimed that Brückner was extradited by German police in 2017 using a European Arrest Warrant over child molestation charges, but he was convicted for the attack on the pensioner. They said it was a breach of international law since Portugal’s government is required to give its consent for him to be extradited for one crime but then convicted of another.
“People extradited by an EU Member State on the basis of a European arrest warrant may not be prosecuted, convicted or subjected to a detention order for an act committed before surrender other than that which is the basis of the surrender,” according to the Law on International Mutual Assistance.
In addition, last week, Brückner received clean chit in the 1996 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. Like Madeleine’s case, in Claudia Ruf’s case also, he was the suspect. When the investigation into the case was launched, Robert Scholten, first police chief commissioner at Bonn police station, said that there was "no concrete evidence" stating that Brückner was involved in the gruesome crime and he killed Ruf, but regardless he was a suspect. But now the DNA tests confirmed that he has not committed 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.