Tuesday, October 8, 2024, 1:12 p.m.
The alleged kidnapper and murderer of the British girl Madeleine McCann, the German Christian Brückner, has been declared innocent of three other cases of rape and two cases of child abuse by the Braunschweig Court on Tuesday. The judges stressed in their sentence that there is insufficient evidence that he committed these crimes and crimes. Although there is the possibility of appeal, if the sentence becomes final, Brückner, 47 years old, could be released in September of next year, at the end of a sentence, also for rape, which he is serving. currently in a German prison.
The trial in Braunschweig has nothing to do with the investigations against the man convicted of other sexual crimes for the disappearance of the girl Maddie McCann in the Portuguese region of the Algarve, for which he is considered the main suspect. The Prosecutor’s Office of the town in northern Germany announced in June 2020 that Brückner is being investigated as the alleged perpetrator of the kidnapping and murder of the little girl who was not yet four years old when she was supposedly kidnapped from a holiday apartment in the town of Praia. gives Light. However, the Braunschweig Prosecutor’s Office has not yet made a formal accusation in that case.
Many observers of the process were counting on Brückner’s declaration of innocence in advance, after the court accepted a petition to lift the arrest warrant against the defendant for the crimes of which he was accused. The president of the Chamber, Uta Engemann, highlighted in the reading of the sentence that not enough evidence had been presented to accuse the suspect of the three rapes and two cases of abuse of minors also committed in Portugal between the years 2000 and 2017. « The rule of law can and must endure this,” the judge said.
In its final intervention after 38 sessions in the trial that began last February, the Prosecutor’s Office had requested a sentence of 15 years in prison and the placement of the suspect after serving that sentence in an indefinite regime of prison guardianship due to his more than possible recidivism. A psychiatric forensic examiner had placed Brückner in “the first division of dangerousness.” His defense lawyers demanded, however, his release due to lack of evidence, a request that was finally addressed by the judges in their verdict.
Christian Brückner, who lived for a long time in Portugal at the beginning of this century, is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence in Germany, handed down in 2019 by the same Braunschweig court, for the rape of a 72-year-old American citizen in 2005 in the Portuguese country. The trial in Braunschweig, his last place of residence in Germany before emigrating to Portugal, had raised great expectations and led to the presence of numerous international media at the court due to suspicions that the accused is also responsible for the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. , whose parents have been looking for their little girl for years.
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