German prosecutors are investigating whether the prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann was involved in a similar case of a five-year-old who went missing in Germany in 2015.
The development comes as newly emerged police reports show that the suspect, a 43-year-old German rapist and child sex offender identified by Portuguese sources on Thursday as Christian Brückner, allegedly fantasised about abducting and sexually abusing minors in a 2013 online chat.
Circumstantial evidence has convinced detectives that Brückner is the strongest suspect yet since the British girl Madeleine disappeared in 2007, aged three. Police in Germany, the UK and Portugal made a major appeal for evidence on Wednesday.
Brückner, who is in prison in the northern German city of Kiel, is said to have told an acquaintance during a Skype chat in September 2013 that he wanted to “catch something small and use it for days”, according to a report by Der Spiegel.
The news magazine also reported that when the acquaintance replied that that would be a dangerous undertaking, Brückner appeared to suggest he had prior experience in this regard: “Oh well, if the evidence is destroyed afterwards.”
According to Der Spiegel, police in the eastern town of Stendal, in Saxony-Anhalt, found records of the chat on a computer they confiscated in early 2016 from a property owned by Brückner.
The dilapidated former box-making factory was searched as part of an arrest warrant in connection with the 2015 disappearance of a five-year-old girl called Inga, who went missing from a care home in the same region.
According to Der Spiegel, investigators also found child sexual abuse images and girl’s clothing inside a trailer on the property, even though Brückner did not have family of his own. It appears he was not investigated further at the time.
The lawyer for Inga’s mother has appealed for police to reopen their investigation into her disappearance. “The file was closed only four weeks after the work began,” Petra Küllmei told the local newspaper Volksstimme. “I consider that lacking in ambition.”
A spokesperson for the state prosecutor in Stendal told the Guardian on Friday a preliminary investigation had been opened into whether there was a link between the disappearances of Madeleine and Inga, who went missing from woodland near the care home.
Inga’s case has often been compared to Madeleine’s, given that no trace has been found of either girl and no charges have been brought. Inga is known by the German media as “the German Maddie”.
Brückner has been described as a drifter with a dandy-esque manner and a string of past convictions, including for sexual offences and child abuse.
In 1994, when he was a teenager, Brückner was convicted of sexual abuse of a child, attempted sexual abuse of a child, and carrying out sexual acts in front of a child. He fled to Portugal with a girlfriend the following year and lived in Praia da Luz.
Brückner has been convicted of crimes including theft and drug-dealing, and was allegedly known to have made break-ins at hotels and holiday homes in the Algarve.
According to court documents seen by the Guardian, Brückner was convicted in Germany last year of the rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Praia da Luz in 2005, two years before Madeleine disappeared from a hotel in the same area where she was staying with her family.
His conviction is under review after defence lawyers argued he had been extradited – this time from Italy, to where he had travelled – on another charge and therefore, under the rules of the European court of justice, cannot be tried for a different crime.
While German authorities said on Thursday they believe Madeleine is dead, British police believe there is no direct evidence of this and continue to treat the case as a missing person investigation.
source https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/05/madeleine-mccann-suspect-christian-bruckner-being-investigated-over-second-missing-girl
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