06/07/2020 - 7:01
- Clarín.com
- Society
The record of Christian Brückner (43) is fearsome. Pedophile, rapist, trafficker and thief are some of the charges among his 17 criminal records. Now, this German prisoner is the main suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the 3-year-old English girl who disappeared from the room she shared with her parents on a vacation in Portugal. Investigators believe Brückner killed the girl.
Brückner lived in the Portuguese Algarve region between 1995 and 2007. He came to that place as a backpacker and, although he worked in the sale and purchase of cars and as a waiter, he also dedicated himself to thefts .
In that area of the south of the Portuguese country is the Praia da Luz spa , where the McCann family, a British national, had gone on vacation in 2007. On May 3 of that year, Maddie was last seen. That night, between 9:10 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., her parents Gerry and Kate went out to dinner and left their daughter with her twin baby brothers Sean and Amelie in the hotel room. When they came back Madeleine was gone.
Praia da Luz, the spa where the McCanns used to vacation when their daughter disappeared. (Reuters)
The parents made the complaint to the Police, who started looking for the baby. The despair was increasing with the passing of the hours since there was not a single trace of Maddie. The case began to take another dimension and generated shock in Europe and the rest of the world.
For 13 years it was a true mystery what could have happened to Madeleine. All kinds of theories were developed: a crime, a kidnapping, child exploitation and even an accident. There were also hundreds of complaints from people in different parts of the world who claimed to have seen a girl like Maddie with other families.
Madeleine McCann. She was three years old when she disappeared.
Even the Portuguese Police even identified Maddie's parents as suspects and investigated them. They never made progress on any track.
Now Brückner's appearance on the record raises a big question: How come he was never mentioned before?
The German is imprisoned in the Kiel prison in his country. On him is a conviction for drug possession dating from 2011 and another for raping a 72-year-old American woman in the Algarve region in 2005, two years before the McCann case.
But for that fact, the Portuguese Justice also took an eternity to reach him. He was recently sentenced in December 2019. McCann's other conviction is for drug possession.
Kate and Gerry McCann, with a picture of what Maddie would be like today.
Brückner's record is completed with 15 other records. Several of them for sexual abuse of children , even when he was a minor.
And there is more. In the last hours it was known that the German was detained between March and December 2006 in the Portuguese prison of Portimão, for stealing fuel. Also in 1999 he spent two months behind bars for "small thefts", in that same country.
That now opens a new hypothesis for researchers. And it is the one that maintains that Brückner, seeing that Kate and Gerry McCann left their room to go to dinner, entered the room in order to steal their belongings . In that situation he would have met Maddie.
According to investigative documents revealed by the German weekly "Der Spiegel," in September 2013, Brückner wrote to an acquaintance with a chat messaging service that he wanted to "grab a tiny thing and abuse it for a few days. "
When the friend warned him of the danger, the German suspect replied, "Oh, not if the evidence is exterminated later." The exact word he used was "vernitchten" in German, the same word the Nazis used for "the final solution."
Brückner left Portugal in 2007, shortly after Maddie's disappearance, but returned nine years later . He was then arrested because he had a German arrest warrant for a sentence for the crime of sexual abuse of a minor.
When Madeleine disappeared, the German was renting a house in Lagos, ten minutes from Praia da Luz. The curious thing is that, having a profile like Brückner's in the disappearance zone, with all his background, the researchers only came to him in 2017.
The house where Brückner lived in Lagos, Portugal, near Praia da Luz, when Maddie disappeared.
It was when the German was in a bar with his Portuguese friend Diego Rivera and they saw a note on television about the tenth anniversary of Maddie's disappearance. Brückner told Rivera that he knew everything that had happened in the McCann case. And then he showed the video of the rape to the American retiree.
Then the friend called the Police , but at that time there were not enough elements to incriminate him. What did move forward was the investigation into the sexual abuse of the 72-year-old woman, which was confirmed when Brückner's DNA tested positive with hair raised from the scene.
The three police officers - German, British and Portuguese - are now looking for witnesses to try to clarify where the suspect was on the day of the girl's disappearance, on May 3, 2007, between 9:10 p.m. and 10:00 p.m.
The truck of the main suspect is appraised by the Police.
Photos have also been released of two dark-colored Jaguar XJR 6 vehicles and a light-colored VW T3 Westfalia van, with which he was apparently able to take Maddie.
There are also indications that on that day he made a call with a Portuguese mobile phone to an unknown person, also an objective of the investigation.
The material collected so far "is not equally sufficient for an arrest warrant or incrimination," said Hans Christian Wolters of the Braunschweig District Attorney's Office on Saturday.
A Jaguar, another one of the cars that belonged to Brückner.
Meanwhile, since he became the main suspect in the McCann case on Thursday, more unsolved cases in which Brückner could be involved have come to light.
One of them is the disappearance of a child in Portugal in 1996. It is about René Hasee , a six-year-old German boy who disappeared from a beach in Algarve during a vacation with his family. René disappeared on June 21, 1996 while he was on the beach of Aljezur, a town that is only 40 kilometers from Praia da Luz. Brückner was 19 at the time. Investigators would now reopen the case , the Portuguese press reported.
Inga Gehricke (5), a missing German girl. In the case they also suspect Christian Brückner.
Meanwhile, on Friday the German prosecutor in Stendal, in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, was looking for a possible link between the case of Inga Gehricke, a six-year-old girl who disappeared in the forest, during a family party, five years ago. . Despite more than 2,000 calls and alleged witnesses to have seen her, search in helicopters and dogs, more than her was never heard from.
By then Brückner lived in his caravan, in a dilapidated factory, 60 kilometers from the place where Inga disappeared in Germany. When they raided the truck, investigators found a flash drive with images of sexual abuse of children.
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