Maddie suspect remains silent
Braunschweig – A German man suspected of abducting the missing British toddler Madeleine McCann remained silent yesterday in his trial on separate sex crime charges, as his lawyers attempted to knock down the evidence against him.
Christian Brueckner, 47, is accused of three counts of rape and two counts of child sex abuse, allegedly committed in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.
The charges are unrelated to the Madeleine McCann case, in which Brueckner was sensationally revealed as a suspect in 2020.
The highly anticipated trial opened last week in Brunswick but was immediately postponed after the defence raised concerns about the suitability of one of the lay judges, who are appointed to advise the main judges on points of law.
The proceedings reopened yesterday with a new lay judge.
After the charges were read out, Brueckner’s lawyer Friedrich Fuelscher said his client would be invoking his right to remain silent.
Fuelscher said the defence team had major doubts about the evidence against Brueckner.
He said that two of the rape charges are based on accounts by two witnesses of watching video footage that is no longer available.
The credibility of these witnesses will be a “massive question” for the judges, he said, alleging they were unreliable because of “drug consumption habits” among other things.
Fuelscher also argued there was no evidence for the timing of the alleged crimes, meaning they might have happened outside the statute of limitations.
In the third rape case, involving a 20-year-old Irish woman, Fuelscher said there was no doubt the crime had taken place, but “the person who committed the offence was not the defendant”.
He also said the two child sex abuse cases would be difficult to prove.
Brueckner is already behind bars in Germany for raping a 72-year-old American tourist in 2005 in Praia da Luz, the same Portuguese seaside resort where Madeleine McCann, often referred to as Maddie, went missing two years later.
If found guilty on all charges, he could face a new sentence of up to 15 years, a spokesperson for the court in Brunswick told AFP.
Madeleine was three at the time she went missing from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in May 2007 as her parents dined at a nearby tapas bar.
The case sparked an international manhunt and huge global media attention that made it one of the most notorious missing-person cases yet.
The revelation of Brueckner as a suspect almost four years ago marked a major turning point in the case.
But although German prosecutors have said they have “concrete evidence” that Madeleine is dead, they have yet to charge Brueckner over her disappearance.
Person who committed the offence was not the defendant