Hunt for suspect’s ex-girlfriend
A girlfriend who lived with the key suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann close to where the British youngster was abducted is being sought by police.
The woman is believed to have left Christian Bruckner shortly before he is suspected of taking Madeleine from a holiday complex in the Algarve. They lived together in a rented farmhouse about two kilometres from the Ocean Club in Praia da Luz where the three-year-old child was abducted from a ground-floor apartment in May 2007.
There are several abandoned wells on the property and neighbouring wasteland. British police searched land near the property in 2014.
A German official working on the case has confirmed that Bruckner, 43, who has a lengthy criminal history, is the suspect of Scotland Yard’s inquiry into the missing child. The Met has placed Bruckner, whose convictions include the rape of a 72-year-old woman and child sex offences, in Praia da Luz on the night that Madeleine was abducted. He reportedly confessed to a friend in a pub that he had snatched her when her face appeared on television during the appeal in 2017, 10 years after her disappearance. The friend tipped off German police who informed the Met, prompting the focus on Bruckner.
Hans Christian Wolters, from the public prosecutor’s office in Braunschweig, Lower Saxony, where Bruckner is in prison, said yesterday ‘‘we are assuming that the girl is dead’’.
‘‘With the suspect, we are talking about a sexual predator who has already been convicted of crimes against little girls and he’s already serving a long sentence,’’ he said.
A British neighbour who was 14 at the time Madeleine was abducted recalled Bruckner as ‘‘an oddball who kept to himself’’. She said: ‘‘You just get a bad feeling about someone.’’
She recalled Bruckner driving his German-registered Jaguar XJR, which he asked a friend to register with a different owner the day after Madeleine disappeared. Bruckner traded in used cars at the farmhouse and worked in a restaurant in the nearby town of Lagos. Police believe that he also burgled local hotels and rental properties and was a drug dealer.
He moved to the Algarve in 1995 at the age of 18, and already had a criminal record. Three years earlier he had committed a break-in and in 1994, Der Spiegel magazine reported, he was convicted of ‘‘abuse of a child’’ and ‘‘performing sex acts in front of a child’’. He was sentenced to two years in a young offenders institution. He has since been convicted of a string of offences including the abuse of young children, offences relating to child abuse images, burglary and drug trafficking.
In September 2005 Bruckner broke into the home of an American woman in Praia da Luz before he gagged, beat and raped her. He was only brought to justice in December last year after police uncovered incriminating video footage. It showed a masked man whipping and raping an older woman who had been tied with goggles. The rapist was armed with a ‘‘curved sabre’’ and beat the woman with a metal object before stealing cash. His victim told investigators that: ‘‘I felt he enjoyed torturing me.’’
Bruckner, who is appealing against his conviction, was tried and convicted in Braunschweig because he was registered as a resident there. He was sentenced to seven years in jail but was already serving a term for drugs.
German police have released photographs of the Praia da Luz property that Bruckner rented in an appeal for witnesses. They include pictures of the inside of the single-storey farmhouse. Two photographs featured a wooden post with scratch marks. The post is said to be similar to that seen in a second video recovered by police from Bruckner which shows a young woman tied to a post screaming in German at a man to let her go and not to rape her.
The British owner of the farmhouse said that he had moved back to the UK with his wife in 1992 and let the property to friends and friends of friends.
A neighbour contacted the owner in 2006 to say the property had been left abandoned. While cleaning the house the neighbour found broken computers and a bin bag ‘‘containing wigs and exotic clothing’’. The owner said he was contacted by British and Portuguese police last year asking for information.
While the girlfriend is believed to have returned to Germany Bruckner remained in Praia da Luz, often sleeping in his VW campervan. He also stayed at the holiday home of a German family several kilometres away.
Hank Dejong, 56, a neighbour of the house in Monte Juden, said Bruckner lived there when the family were away and fed their dogs. German police released pictures of that house, now the home of an English couple. – The Times