"Elements" were discovered during excavations in Portugal as part of the investigation into the disappearance of little Madeleine McCann in 2007, but may be unrelated to the case, said Thursday, June 1, the prosecutor's office of Brunswick (Germany).
At the end of May, Portuguese police conducted searches for three days near a reservoir in Silves, a municipality in the tourist region of the Algarve (southern Portugal), at the request of the German authorities.
'Still too early'
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Some elements were seized as part of this operation. These will be analyzed in the coming days and weeks," the German prosecutor's office said in a statement, adding that it was "still too early" to determine whether they are related to the case. "The investigation conducted in Brunswick on the 46-year-old suspect will probably continue for a long time," warns the prosecutor's office. This man, who is serving a prison sentence in Germany for the rape of a 72-year-old American woman in 2005 in Portugal, was identified in 2020 by German investigators as Christian Brueckner, a repeat pedophile who lived for several years in the Algarve.
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According to Portuguese media, investigators collected soil samples during the excavations and gathered several shreds of fabric found at the scene. According to local press reports, police were looking for a pink blanket or pajamas Maddie was wearing on the night of her disappearance. The area of the Arade dam, located about fifty kilometers from the site of the disappearance of "Maddie", had already been raked in 2008, including by divers who had found only animal remains. According to local media, the German suspect went there regularly and described the place as his "little paradise".
Madeleine McCann disappeared on 3 May 2007 from the room of a hotel complex in Praia da Luz, a small resort in the Algarve where she spent holidays with her family, while her parents dined with friends at a nearby restaurant. The disappearance of the British girl gave rise to an exceptional international campaign led by Kate and Gerry McCann to try to find her, and remains one of the great criminal enigmas of recent years.