German justice has opened a new investigation against the main suspect in the disappearance in 2007 in Portugal of the little Briton Maddie McCann, concerning the rape of a young Irish girl in 2004, announced Tuesday (September 22) the prosecutor of Brunswick.
Read also: EU justice: unfavorable opinion to the suspect in the Maddie case in another procedure
"
I can confirm that we are also investigating the suspicion of rape of a young Irish woman in 2004 in the Algarve (the region where Madeleine McCann disappeared)
", prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters told AFP .
The victim had lodged a complaint just after the facts 16 years ago but it was by discovering in the media at the beginning of June photos of the main suspect, the German Christian B., that she came forward "
because she believes he recognized his attacker,
”he added.
The investigation was opened in late June, according to Wolters.
In addition to the Maddie affair, Christian B. is also the subject of an investigation for sexual assault on a girl aged 10 at the time of the facts in the Algarve in April 2007, a few weeks before the disappearance of the little Briton. .
"
He is accused of having masturbated in front of the child,
" said Hans Christian Wolters, specifying that this investigation was opened last year.
Lack of "forensic evidence"
The Maddie case saw a sudden acceleration in early June with the identification of Christian B., 43, a repeat offender pedophile already convicted of rape in Portugal and currently in detention in Kiel, in northern Germany, for a another matter.
He is suspected of the murder of the three-year-old girl, who was on vacation with her parents when she disappeared one evening from the hotel room where she was sleeping.
In mid-June, the Brunswick public prosecutor's office had explained that it had "
evidence or concrete facts
" supporting the conviction of the death of the girl but not "
forensic evidence
" in the sense that, for example, the remains of the body would have been found.
He reiterated these assertions on Portuguese television on Monday evening.
According to Christian B.'s lawyer quoted in the media, the man refutes any involvement in Maddie's disappearance.
At the end of July, German police also carried out searches in a workers' garden near Hanover.
The suspect was living at the material time a few kilometers from the hotel where Maddie's family was staying, in the small Portuguese seaside resort of Praia da Luz.
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