Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Driver gets a £120k boost for birthday
Police allotment hunt ‘an act of desperation’
A LUCKY punter hopes to banish bad birthday memories after winning £10,000 a month for a whole year.
Retired HGV driver William, aka Frank, Beard from Saltash, Cornwall, turns 68 on Monday and won on the National Lottery’s Set For Life.
He said: “The staff in the store thought I had won £1,000 a month, which would have done me nicely, but when I rang Camelot and realised it was £10,000 a month, I was doubly delighted.”
Frank, who had to selfisolate for nine weeks, hopes the win will dull bad memories of being mugged on his birthday last year.
He said: “Hopefully, this one will be quite the opposite! My mate Ian and I will book a meal again – and yes, I’ll be footing the bill!”
A POLICE search of the garden allotment where Brueckner lived was an act of “pure” desperation, his lawyer claims.
Officers spent two days digging up the foundations of the rented shack, removing rubble from the remains.
Diggers, sniffer dogs, groundpenetrating radar and drones were used to examine the site near Hanover where he stayed after Madeleine vanished.
When they left on Wednesday evening, they refused to say what had been discovered.
But it is believed they lifted a stone slab to find a cellar full of corrugated iron, which a sniffer dog reacted to. Brueckner’s lawyer Friedrich Fuelscher called the search a “pure desperate act of the public prosecutor’s office”.
This week locals urged police to search a second site an hour away but Mr Fuelscher said: “They won’t find anything there.” a rapist of an elderly woman and targeted children. We could not have known he was such a monster.”
The three pals had been taking part in a challenge to transport a caravan from Faro in the Algarve to Saxony in Germany while surviving on 10 Euros a day, getting truck drivers to tow it. A pal of Brueckner suggested he could help.
Brueckner drove 300 miles, almost five hours, from Praia da Luz to Malaga, Spain, to pick them up, then drove them for another three hours to Vera, Almeria.
“He was a stranger and decided to drive us,” Tomas said. “He told us to call him the ‘Happy Hobby Hippy’ because he liked to hang out with people who were hippies.
“When we got there we all hugged him and thanked him and he said he was going on back to Portugal.”
A few days later he messaged them to say: “Guys, enjoy your remaining days with all your heart, because reality will catch up with you very quickly.”
In June last year Interpol quizzed the woman in the group about the trip.
Former mechanic Brueckner, 43, is in a German jail for drug offences.
He is still awaiting sentence for the rape of a 72-year-old woman in Portugal.