We’re sure Brueckner did it, say Maddie prosecutors
Public ‘would agree if they saw evidence’
GERMAN prosecutors are ‘very confident’ the chief suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann is the right man.
They said if the public ‘knew the evidence we had’ they would be just as sure paedophile Christian Brueckner abducted the British toddler.
The man building the case, Hans Christian Wolters, admitted his team do not have enough on Brueckner to charge him but said that may change early next year.
Brueckner, 43, is currently in a German jail for drugs smuggling and the rape of a 72-year- old American woman in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in 2005.
It is the same resort from where, in 2007, three-year-old Madeleine vanished while on holiday with parents Kate and Glasgow-born Gerry McCann.
Mr Wolters said that his team’s investigations into the German drifter, who lived in the Algarve from 1997 to 2007, have yielded fresh evidence of at least three other alleged sex crimes, two of them against children. He told the BBC: ‘I can’t promise... we have enough to bring a charge, but I’m very confident because what we have so far doesn’t allow any other conclusion at all.
‘If you knew the evidence we had you would come to the same conclusion as I do but I can’t give you details because we don’t want the accused to know what we have.’
Although British police are still officially treating Madeleine’s case as a missing persons inquiry, German prosecutors believe that she is definitely dead.
The new probe into the disappearance of the toddler from Rothley, Leicestershire, was initially marred
‘Don’t want the accused to know’
by a war of words between German and Portuguese police.
Since then, detectives from both forces, as well as the Metropolitan Police, have held meetings in Lisbon to assess the evidence they have against Brueckner.
Portuguese officials handed over information relating to searches carried out in abandoned wells in the Algarve.
German detectives shared details of i nterviews with Brueckner’s associates, including his British ex-girlfriend – a Berkshire-born mother of two who was interviewed for 12 hours in Faro in August.
She dated Brueckner several years before Madeleine’s disappearance and told detectives how he brutally beat her and stalked her, and also broke into her Algarve apartment and hid under her bed.
Brueckner is also being investigated in connection with the rape of an Irish holiday rep in the resort of Praia da Rocha in 2004.