COPS URGED TO EXAMINE OLD MADDIE SUSPECT LINKED TO 3 OTHERS Rapist probed for more child horrors
CONVICTED paedo Christian Bruckner may be linked to three more unsolved child horrors, believes a former Madeleine Mccann cop.
Last night Jim Gamble was urging police to retrace the movements of rapist Bruckner, 43, fearing he may be responsible for the appalling crimes.
The monster has already been linked to the 2015 disappearance of Inga Gehricke, aged five, described as the German Maddie.
Detectives are re-examining the murder of German Carola Titze, 16, in 1996. And last night the dad of René Hasee, a six-year-old boy who vanished from an Algarve beach 24 years ago, was demanding answers. Andreas Hasee said, cops had contacted him after Bruckner was named as a suspect.
He said: “I have no doubt Maddie and René’s cases are linked. “He was a lovely boy, my first child and I’ll never get over what happened. I think of him every day and imagine what sort of man he would have been and what we would have done together.”
On June 21, 1996, René vanished while running on a beach near his mum and stepdad. His clothes were later found on the sand and the authorities speculated that he had drowned in a tragic accident.
The family had been staying in Aljezur, 25 miles from Praia da Luz, where Madeleine had been.
Andreas doubts his son drowned and claimed the Portuguese police investigation was not thorough enough.
He said: “An expert showed even if he has drowned the waves would have brought his body back but they never found him. He would not have gone into the sea on his own and his footprints just stopped in the sand.
“Just look at both of the children, you can see how handsome René is and how beautiful Maddie looks and they were almost the same age.
“With their blonde hair they would have been perfect for any paedophile and I strongly believe both children were taken. There is no doubt of it.”
Mr Gamble, a senior child protection officer in the UK’S first police probe into Madeleine’s disappearance, said Bruckner was a “driven and motivated sexual predator”.
Also a former head of the National Crime Agency’s child unit, Mr Gamble said: “The nature of the beast, the nature of these people and the way they are driven towards offending, certainly in my experience, you don’t get a one-off offender.
“From the profile of this individual, what you can see is he has offended against girls and he’s offended against older women. I’d be shocked if someone like that had limited themselves to one offence.”
He said cops will revisit places he’s been and look at the opportunities he may have had to commit similar crimes. International forces are liaising as more evidence comes to light after Bruckner was unmasked as the prime suspect in Madeleine’s disappearance.
Fellow German Carola, from Bremen, vanished during a family holiday to a Sunparks resort in De Haan, Belgium.
She told her parents she was going to meet friends on the beach and when she failed to turn up they thought she had gone to a rock concert with pals.
Carola was missing for a week before her mutilated body was found a in sand dunes near the holiday park.
Police focused on a German teenager she met in a disco who is said to have boasted of a criminal background and told Carola he was on holiday under the guidance of a youth court. Bruckner was 19 when Carola was killed.
Her case was officially shut in 2016 but the Bruges prosecutor’s office is understood to be probing a link to Bruckner. A spokesman said: “The file will be re-examined.”
Meanwhile the parents of little Inga Gehricke were hoping for answers too.
They separated after she vanished in May 2015 while collecting wood for a family barbecue in a forest in central Germany. Both are still too distraught to talk.
She disappeared the day before the eighth anniversary of the day Madeleine went missing from her family’s Portugal holiday apartment in 2007. Bruckner refused to comment about Inga’s disappearance when questioned in prison.
Police first searched a disused factory where Bruckner lived in 2016.
They fear the dilapidated property, half a mile down a country track from the nearest road, was his lair. It is 48 miles from where Inga disappeared.