He main suspect in the 2007 disappearance of British girl Madeleine McCann He could be released in September 2025, after being acquitted this Tuesday of three counts of rape and two of child sexual abuse in a separate trial held in Germany.
According to the criteria of
The German prosecutor’s office had requested 15 years in prison against Christian Brueckner, 47 years old, for sexual assaults and rapes committed between 2000 and 2017 in Portugal, but the magistrates determined that there was not enough evidence to incriminate Brückner.
This trial was not related to the case of Maddie, the girl who disappeared in 2007 in Portugal and for which Brückner has not been formally charged.
The acquittal pronounced on Tuesday by the court in Brunswick, in northern Germany, opens the way to a possible release of the suspect next year, when Brückner finishes serving a sentence for rape.
The prosecution announced that it will appeal. “We consider this ruling to be a mistake,” Attorney General Christian Wolters told AFP.
In 2020, German justice identified Brückner as the main suspect in Maddie’s disappearance, a case that went around the world and triggered a huge international campaign to find her.
Maddie disappeared in 2007, when she was three years old, from the rental apartment where her family was on vacation.while his parents had gone out to dinner nearby.
At that time, Brückner lived near where the McCann family spent their vacations and was close to the apartment from which the girl disappeared, according to data collected from his cell phone.
There is a witness who claims that the suspect confessed to the murder of the little girl, but at the moment there is not enough evidence to formally accuse him.
The case in which Brückner was tried
German prosecutors described Brückner as a “dangerous psychopathic sadist”, adding that they feared he would reoffend.
In one of the cases for which he was tried, He was suspected of sexually assaulting a 10-year-old German girl on a beach in April 2007. a few months before Maddie disappeared.
In another case, he was accused of indecent exposure to an 11-year-old Portuguese girl in a playground.
He was also accused of raping a septuagenarian – tied up and beaten in her holiday apartment -, a 14-year-old girl – who was gagged and tied to a wooden post in her home -, and a 20-year-old Irish woman whose home was raided by the balcony.
The Irish victim came to testify as part of the trial last May, but since the man who raped her had his face covered with a mask, an unequivocal identification of the perpetrator was not possible.
But the evidence presented against him was not enough. In the absence of DNA traces, the prosecution based its accusation on statements from witnesses and those close to Brückner.
The German is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for raping an American woman who was then 72 years old in 2005 in Praia da Luz, the town where Madeleine McCann disappeared.
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