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Christian B. (2018): Charged with multiple sex offenses
Photo: HANDOUT/AFP
Arrest warrants have been issued against Christian B. - the suspect in the case of the missing Madeleine McCann - for several other sex crimes.
This was announced by the district court of Braunschweig.
In total, there are five acts in which the strong suspicion is affirmed.
The arrest warrant does not refer to the Madeleine McCann case.
According to the court, it is currently not possible to execute the new arrest warrant because it requires Italy's consent.
B. was picked up there in 2018 and extradited to Germany for another crime.
The public prosecutor's office in Braunschweig now wants to obtain approval.
However, the arrest warrant would not have any direct effects anyway, since B. is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence in Lower Saxony for, among other things, raping an elderly US tourist in Portugal.
In principle, however, the court sees the 45-year-old as the grounds for the risk of absconding and the risk of recurrence.
The background is an indictment for acts that B. is said to have committed in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.
The investigators accuse B. of rape and child abuse.
According to prosecutors, the victims were girls and women between the ages of about ten and the elderly.
One of the alleged victims is the Irish woman Hazel Behan, who was attacked and raped in June 2004 at the age of 20 on the Portuguese Algarve coast in her apartment in a holiday complex.
Some of the other alleged victims are still unknown.
The investigators refer to video recordings that the accused himself is said to have made of the victims during the crime.
However, the police did not have the recordings.
The charges are based on testimonies from two men who testified about the videos.
One of them had told police B. also accused Madeleine McCann of the case.
The three-year-old girl disappeared from a Portuguese holiday resort in 2007.
There is no trace of Madeleine to this day.
Attorney Friedrich Fülscher, who represents Christian B., told SPIEGEL: »The arrest warrant impresses us little.
That was foreseeable, especially since Braunschweig is considered a place of justice where hardly a piece of paper fits between the court and the public prosecutor.«
bbr/gud
