Madeleine suspect ‘terrified’ local villagers

● German drifter feared as gun-toting criminal

The prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann was feared as a gun-toting criminal, according to locals in the small town he holed up in shortly after she went missing.

Christian Brückner found a job as a waiter in a remote village 65km from Praia da Luz where Madeleine went missing, and befriended a German couple who looked after foster children, often staying at their house, local reports claimed on

Sunday. 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.

Brückner has been identified as being in Praia da Luz on the night Madeleine was taken from her hotel room, and new reports claimed that he had been tipped off that guests at the Ocean Club hotel, where the McCanns stayed, 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, Brückner decamped and drove his VW T3 Westfalia camper van to Foral.

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 Brückner arrived.

Another resident, who did not want to be named, said that she was constantly worrying about her teenage daughter, who would walk off to meet the German couple and their “new friend” and came back with cigarettes.

Questions are now being asked about the relationship between the foster carers and the convicted paedophile they invited into their home.

On Sunday, it was established that the woman was called Nicole Fehlinger, and is from the same German town as Brückner.

Her LinkedIn profile says she is “self-employed in social services”.

Fehlinger and her husband rented the large, rundown villa from Lia Silva.

From there she established a base to foster German children, and looked after a teenage boy for three years before 2007.

Silva said: “She told people she was a child psychologist and was getting these troubled children through some arrangement with the German government.

“As far as I know she had two kids.

”The first one was fine, but the second one ran away.

“How they got this guy [Brückner] to come looking for her, I’ve got no idea.

“She was maybe 15 or 16. He [Brückner] found her.

“She was in Lagos with a group of Romanians, and from what I’ve heard at the time, when she got back to the house, she was pregnant.

“Then the teenager disappeared and then this guy disappeared.

“I assumed she was taken back to Germany given the circumstances that she was pregnant. After this incident the woman never got any more children to look after.”

Fehlinger left the area towards the end of 2009.

The couple have not been accused of any wrongdoing and it is not known if they knew of Brückner’s past.

Now Brückner is languishing in a jail in Kiel, but still strikes fear into those who came across him.

One elderly woman, sitting in the O Fornal restaurant where Brückner 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. ”—