A suspect has been charged in Germany at the request of the Portuguese judiciary as part of the investigation into the disappearance of British girl Madeleine McCann in 2007, the Portimao prosecutor’s office in the Algarve announced on Thursday April 21. The suspect, whose identity has not been confirmed, was charged on Wednesday, prosecutors said in a statement.
German authorities have suspected Christian B., a repeat pedophile, since 2020. This man is currently serving a sentence in Germany for the 2005 rape of a 72-year-old American man in southern Portugal.
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The girl disappeared on May 3, 2007, just before her fourth birthday, in Praia da Luz, a seaside resort in southern Portugal, where she was vacationing with her parents and a group of friends. According to German investigators, Christian B. lived a few kilometers from the family hotel at the relevant time.
Her disappearance sparked an extraordinary international campaign to find her. Photos of little Maddie, with her bobbed light brown hair and big bright eyes, have been seen all over the world.
Advances from Germany
After fourteen months of controversial investigations, marked in particular by the parents’ charges before being resolved, the Portuguese police closed the case in 2008 before reopening the case five years later. “The file was reopened after the emergence of new elements,” a spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office told Agence France-Presse, specifying that the investigation has since continued “in collaboration with the English and German authorities”.
After their parents were a ubiquitous media presence in the months following Madeleine’s disappearance, her parents have maintained a relative silence for a number of years, which they would only come out of in the event of a major turn in the affair.