A German man has been officially named as a suspect in connection with the 2007 disappearance of three-year-old British Madeleine McCann, who disappeared while vacationing with her parents in the Algarve, Portuguese authorities said on Thursday.
Christian Brückner, who is currently being held in Germany for the rape of a 72-year-old American woman in 2005, is now considered an “arguido”, which translates to “named suspect”.
According to AFP, the classification was carried out on Wednesday at the request of Portugal by German prosecutors. Brückner, 45, is already charged with allegedly raping a 20-year-old Irish woman in 2004, three years before McCann’s disappearance, and is also being investigated for the rape and choking of a 13-year-old boy and the disappearance of a 5-year-old girl. He has also been charged with theft, forgery and drug trafficking in recent years.
Brückner is the first and only official suspect in the case since McCann’s parents, Kate and Gerry, were investigated by investigators in 2007 but later acquitted.
Earlier this year, a German documentary film crew discovered that Brückner was working as a handyman during the family’s stay at the resort from which McCann disappeared, the Ocean Club in Praia da Luz, in spring 2007.
Brückner’s lawyer Friedrich Fülscher told the Bild newspaper that his client had not been charged and called the step a “procedural trick to avoid the impending statute of limitations in a few days”. Under Portuguese law, murder charges have a 15-year statute of limitations; Fumbler noted that the statute in the McCann case ends on May 3.
If Brückner is formally charged with McCann’s kidnapping and murder, he could face trial in either Germany or Portugal.
McCann’s body was never found. German prosecutors told Kate and Gerry McCann in 2020 they had “concrete evidence” their daughter was no longer alive.
As a child, Brückner was “terribly abused” by his parents, locked in the basement for hours and “not even allowed a glass of water,” the Times of London reported last year.
Brückner first emerged as a person of interest in McCann’s disappearance in 2017. Brückner later protested his innocence in an incoherent letter to a German documentary film crew, writing: “Driving during the day if possible so my battered ‘hippie bus’ won’t be noticed, only driving on roads that I need to, and most importantly, never provoking the police.” So that means not committing any crimes, let alone kidnapping someone. However, for me at the time it was just as absurd as starting a nuclear war or slaughtering a chicken.”
In 2020, while in a holding cell awaiting court appearance on an unrelated drug charge, guards fractured two of Brückner’s ribs when they tried to hold him down during an altercation. The incident reportedly began when Brückner, who had refused to put on a set of shackles, smeared yogurt on the walls of the cell and deliberately clogged the toilet.
That same year, German police discovered a secret cellar under a garden shed on a property where Brückner once lived. Investigators confiscated several items from the room, including a children’s toy bucket.
Brückner continues to protest his innocence. In June last year he called the ongoing investigation into his involvement in McCann’s death an “incredible scandal”.