Suspect ‘terrified’ villagers
The prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann was feared as a gun-toting criminal, say locals in the small town he holed up in shortly after she went missing.
Christian Brueckner found a job as a waiter in a remote village 65 kilometres from Praia da Luz and befriended a German couple who looked after foster children, often staying at their house, local reports claimed yesterday.
Remarkably, Portuguese police have not yet visited the village of Foral to interview potential witnesses, despite the overwhelming evidence that the convicted sex offender was living there in the weeks after Madeleine disappeared.
Residents also claimed that Brueckner led a search party to find a teenage girl who ran away from the foster home in the summer of 2007, and found her in a seaside town nearby.
Although the timeline is unclear, it has been said that the young girl was pregnant by the time she returned and left the area for good soon after.
Brueckner has been identified as being in Praia da Luz on the night Madeleine was taken from her hotel room, and new reports yesterday claimed that he had been tipped off that guests at the Ocean Club hotel often left their rooms unlocked.
His movements in the immediate aftermath of the disappearance had been a mystery, but it is now clear that as police descended on the town of Praia da Luz, Brueckner decamped and drove his VW T3 Westfalia camper van to a remote village surrounded by farmland 65 kilometres away.
By this point, aged 30, he already had convictions for child sex offences, drug dealing, theft and he had raped a 72-year-old American tourist at a luxury seafront villa in Praia da Luz.
‘‘Everyone was absolutely terrified when he was around because he used to carry a gun,’’ said Lia Silva, a local woman who lived with her parents when Brueckner arrived.
Angie Dawes, a British woman who also lives in the village, told The Sun that he used to leer at her, which she said ‘‘chilled her to the bone . . . I would never let myself be left alone with him’’.
Questions are now being asked about the relationship between the foster carers and the convicted paedophile they invited into their home.
Yesterday, The Daily Telegraph established that the woman was called Nicole Fehlinger, and is from the same German town as Brueckner. Her Linkedin profile says she is ‘‘selfemployed in social services’’.
The couple have not been accused of any wrongdoing.
Brueckner is now in a jail in Kiel, but still strikes fear into those who came across him. One elderly woman, in a restaurant where he used to work, started crying when asked about him.
‘‘I don’t want to relive this man. The destruction he has caused. The things he had done. I cannot bear to think of it.’’