Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Maddie suspect ‘dug second secret cellar’
Locals call for police search at garden home
POLICE have been asked to search a second allotment in Germany amid claims the Madeleine Mccann suspect reopened a cellar there.
This week police carried out a two-day search at an address in Hanover where Christian Brueckner allegedly stayed in a hut with a cellar around 2010.
Now locals in Braunschweig want a similar search of a small garden house where he lived from 2013 to 2016.
They claim he lifted floorboards to access a 20ft cellar there and fear he may have hidden the body of a missing child known as the “German Maddie”.
Brueckner, 43, was quizzed but never charged after Inga Gehricke, five, vanished in 2015 near his Braunschweig home. Its current tenant Sabina Sellag, a tour guide, is said to be in “such a panic” that she has been sleeping outside.
Her pal Thoma Tager said she was “terrified” of living in the tiny house by a railway line, adding: “She has begged police to come with search dogs. She said to me ‘I’m worried I am sleeping on a dead body’.”
Ms Sellag, in her 30s, said previously she was “disappointed” police had not searched.
A neighbour, who did not wish to be named, said last night: “She is convinced Inga is under there. That cellar was built by a previous tenant. Brueckner removed the floorboards and jumped into it. There was loads of rubbish inside and he added to it. The new tenant is in such a panic. She has spent a week sleeping outside. It is strange there is a cellar as they are forbidden in gardens. He was a smalltime criminal.”
Brueckner’s landlord at the private gardens also denied the suspect built the cellar – but another neighbour claims Brueckner worked for two months building it. Manfred Richter, 80, said: “He excavated the floor of the house. He carried out rocks and earth by hand and dumped them by the front.
“He put planks of wood over the hole. This work got him in trouble with the authorities.”
His son Karsten said he alerted police two months ago to the fact Brueckner owned the Braunschweig plot, adding: “I thought the next day there’d be a huge police presence but nobody came.”
Mr Richter’s sister Helga Neu, who owns a plot next to the site Brueckner once owned, said: “I wouldn’t mind if police came, who knows he could have hidden something in the cellar.”
Police at the Hanover search site, an hour away, did not say what was found.
Maddie was three when she vanished while on holiday in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in 2007. Brueckner was believed to be in the area at the time.
He is in jail for rape and drug offences.
He carried out rocks and earth by hand, dumping it at the front
MANFRED RICHTER FORMER NEIGHBOUR