Portuguese police announced on Thursday that they had halted excavations near a lake in southern Portugal, which had been carried out since Tuesday at the request of German authorities, as part of the investigation into the disappearance of little Madeleine McCann in 2007.
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The criminal investigation department clarified in a press release that “the collected material will be handed over to the German authorities”, who since 2020 have assumed that they are convinced of the death of the British girl and suspect a German multiple-recidivist sex offender who has already been arrested in his country for a rape in Portugal. .
Police gave no details on the items collected or the purpose of the operation, which was carried out on the banks of a water reservoir in Silves, a municipality in the Algarve’s tourist region, with the involvement of German and British investigators.
On May 3, 2007, just before celebrating her fourth birthday, Madeleine McCann disappeared from a room in a hotel complex in Praia da Luz, a small seaside resort in the Algarve, where she was vacationing with her family while her parents were having dinner with friends nearby restaurant.
The British girl’s disappearance sparked an extraordinary international campaign led by Kate and Gerry McCann to find her and remains one of the great criminal mysteries of recent years.
The Arade Dam region, about fifty kilometers from the site of Maddie’s disappearance, had already been combed in 2008, including by divers, who had only found animal remains.
According to local media, the German suspect went there regularly and described the place as his “little paradise”.
This man, who is serving a prison sentence in Germany for the 2005 rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Portugal, was identified by German investigators in 2020 as Christian Brueckner, a now 46-year-old and lifelong pedophile in the Algarve for several years.
Between Tuesday and Thursday, investigators surveyed the excavation area using dogs, a drone and a caterpillar brush cutter. Some parts of the country have been combed with probes, shovels and rakes.
According to local media, investigators have been collecting soil samples and collecting several scraps of cloth found at the site since the excavations began.
According to local press, police were also looking for a pink blanket or the pajamas Maddie was wearing the night of her disappearance.
According to the Portuguese weekly Expresso, it was the testimony of an informant whom the German investigators considered “very credible” that prompted them to take an interest in the place again.