Bruckner prosecutor: We assume there are more victims

GERMAN prosecutors have said they “assume there are more victims” but that they have not formally interviewed the suspect over the missing three-year-old.

Christian Brückner was named last week as a new suspect in the investigation to find Madeleine, who vanished 13 years ago in Praia da Luz, Portugal.

His identity was revealed after German prosecutors announced that a man was being investigated on suspicion of murdering Madeleine. He was named only as “Christian B” in the German

media due to strict privacy laws.

Since last week’s significant development in the Mccann case, it has emerged that Brückner is also a suspect regarding a string of other missing children in Germany and Belgium.

Yesterday, officials appeared to confirm the concerns, with Braunschweig state prosecutor, Hans Christian Wolters, saying: “We assume there are more victims.”

Mr Wolters also revealed that the suspect’s connection to the case of missing Madeleine is only based on “circumstantial suspicion” and that he has not been questioned yet by police.

The senior prosecutor said: “It is currently a circumstantial suspicion.

We have not yet questioned the suspect in this case.”

The German authorities have so far said little in public but extensive details of the investigation have been leaked to the German press.

While it is illegal to release suspects’ full names in Germany, police made as much information as they could public in the hope Brückner would quickly be identified, according to the usually well-informed Frankfurter Allgemeine

Sonntagszeitung newspaper.

The move was part of a deliberate strategy to bring forward witnesses, because police do not yet have the evidence to secure a conviction.

Prosecutors believe Brückner may be a multiple offender who could have been involved in the disappearance of several children across western Europe.

They are determined to obtain evidence linking him to at least one disappearance so they can secure a successful prosecution.

Their ability to manoeuvre has been restricted by German laws that entitle a suspect to demand access to their case file as soon as they are identified.

Prosecutors want to prevent lawyers for Brückner from getting access to his file until they are ready to bring charges.

That is why they have refused to confirm whether he is their suspect, even after his name and picture have been published around the world.

It is thought this may be the reason they have yet to interview him in connection with Maddie’s disappearance.

Police are re-examining the disappearance of five-year-old Inga Gehrike – known in the German media as “the German Maddie” – who vanished during a family barbecue in 2015 in Saxony-anhalt, 70 miles from where Brückner lived in Braunschweig.

The public prosecutor said police would search for “new clues in connection with a suspect in Braunschweig”.

The father of René Hasee, a six-yearold boy who went missing while on holiday in the Algarve, Portugal, in 1996, when Brückner lived in the region, has been told by the Federal Criminal Police Office in Germany that it is reopening that investigation.

Andreas Hasee said he believes the two missing persons cases of his son and Madeleine “aren’t that different at all – and that he [Brückner] could have something to do with it”.

In Belgium, the public prosecutor’s office in Bruge confirmed it was investigating whether Brückner was connected to the murder of Carola Titze, 16, whose body was found in dunes in De Haan in 1996.

She was reported to have been in contact with a German man in the days before her murder.