The parents of Madeleine McCann, the British girl who disappeared fifteen years ago in southern Portugal, said this Friday (22) that they had “not given up hope” of finding their daughter, a day after Portuguese justice found a man in accused Germany. .
“While the possibility is slim, we have not given up hope that Madeleine is still alive and that we will find her,” Kate and Gerry McCann wrote in a statement posted on the website dedicated to their daughter.
Both stressed that the suspect “has not yet been charged with any specific offense in connection with Madeleine’s disappearance”.
THAT The Portuguese public prosecutor’s office announced on Thursday (21st) that they had applied for the indictment of a suspect in Germany. without specifying his identity or the nature of the suspicions he is under, as part of an investigation into Maddie’s disappearance, conducted “in cooperation with the English and German authorities”.
The reactions of the Braunschweig public prosecutor’s office and the lawyer of a German suspect identified as “Christian B”, collected by AFP this Friday, leave no doubt that he has also become the number 1 suspect in the Portuguese public prosecutor’s office.
“It’s obvious that Portugal is also suspicious of him,” but “I would be surprised if they were more advanced in the investigation overnight than we are here,” said Hans Christian Wolters, spokesman for the Braunschweig public prosecutor’s office responsible for the German part of the case, in an interview with AFP.
“We must not overestimate this measure by the Portuguese authorities,” said lawyer Friedrich Sebastian Fülscher, who represents “Christian B.”
prescription risk
“In Portugal, even a murder has a statute of limitations of 15 years. In the case of Madeleine, if she died in May 2007, it will happen in a few weeks. I assume that the statute of limitations has been broken with this action,” he added.
“What happened has to do with the recipe. […] Basically, it’s a procedural trick by prosecutors to keep the case open, said Gonçalo Amaral, a former Portuguese inspector who was in charge of the case. He was fired by police after accusing the girl’s parents of accidentally killing her and hiding her body. . .
Madeleine McCann, known as Maddie in the British press, disappeared on May 3, 2007, shortly before her fourth birthday, in Praia da Luz, a seaside resort in the Algarve where she was vacationing with her family.
Her disappearance sparked an extraordinary international campaign by her parents to find her. The photos of little Maddie with her brown hair and big light eyes went around the world.
Rape and sexual assault on minors
After 14 months of controversial investigations marked by the indictment and subsequent exoneration of parents Gerry and Kate McCann, the Portuguese court closed the case in 2008 before reopening it five years later over “new elements”.
However, the case only made real progress in June 2020, when the Braunschweig public prosecutor said it was certain that the girl had died, adding that their suspicion fell on a man who had been imprisoned in another case in Kiel.
At the time of Maddie’s disappearance, Christian B., who is currently serving a sentence for the 2005 rape of a 72yearold American woman in southern Portugal, was living a few kilometers from Hotel Praia da Luz, where the girl disappeared, according to report.. the German researchers .
The public prosecutor’s office in Braunschweig has also initiated proceedings against him in another case of rape, that of an Irish woman, and for sexual abuse of minors in Portugal.
“My colleagues are working on these other cases so that we can close this chapter in the near future. When it is completed, we will deal exclusively with Maddie,” said Hans Christian Wolters, spokesman for the Braunschweig public prosecutor’s office, the news agency AFP.