MADDIE: Police find secret cellar
THE prime suspect in the Madeleine McCann case wanted to create a “cellar dungeon” at his home, it has been claimed.
Christian Brueckner allegedly told a friend he was planning a secret underground lair.
Details emerged as investigators yesterday discovered a cellar at an allotment linked to Brueckner.
Officers carrying out a massive digging operation were said to be focusing on the makeshift basement at the site where Brueckner lived after returning to Germany from Portugal in 2007.
The convicted paedophile, 43, is alleged to have claimed he wanted to soundproof and insulate the hidden domain.
The revelations came as masses of soil and rubble were removed from the scene to be forensically analysed in laboratories. It is thought heavy equipment was used to smash up and remove the foundations of the cellar as police dug a 10ft hole at the plot of land, located near the village of Ahlam, five miles from Hanover.
Yesterday, neighbours told how Brueckner lived there for about a year in a camper van and a wooden shed which had its own kitchen with the cellar built underneath.
One neighbour told how the suspect arrived in the early summer of 2007 and rented the plot for a few months.
He claimed Brueckner wanted to insulate the small shack which stood on a concrete base in the garden with a small cellar underneath.
He allegedly told the neighbour he wanted to fit it with polystyrene boards he had hoarded.
Another neighbour, school bus driver Jurgen Kavadka, said: “In the end the authorities kicked him off and tore down the hut but the foundations and cellar were still there.The whole thing is gruesome.
“The owner of the allotment let him stay there after meeting him at a festival in Hanover and finding out he was homeless.”
A former friend of Brueckner, known only as Bjorn, said the suspect had told him he planned to convert the basement of his home in a “garden colony” into a “cellar dungeon”.
The outbuilding was reportedly demolished around the time Brueckner left in 2008.
Brueckner is currently in prison in Germany and has convictions for sex and drugs offences.
Wolfgang Kossack, who had a plot in the area, said: “He told me that he was living off the grid, that he had not registered with the authorities. No one knew he was there.
“At the time there was a building on the garden. It had a cellar and underneath there would be foundations.”
Madeleine was aged three when she disappeared on a family holiday in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in May 2007.
It is believed Madeleine’s parents Kate and Gerry are being kept updated with developments.
Brueckner’s lawyer, Friedrich Fulscher, said his client “denies any involvement” in Madeleine’s disappearance.