Met’s log placed Brueckner near resort

CHRISTIAN BRUECKNER was identified as a prime suspect for the abduction of Madeleine McCann after German police compared details of the sex offender’s phone with a sophisticated British call database.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, German prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters revealed how painstaking Anglo-German police work led to the biggest breakthrough in the inquiry since the youngster was kidnapped in Praia da Luz, Portugal, on May 3, 2007.

Officers from the BKA, Germany’s federal police, obtained the number for a mobile phone that Brueckner had in 2007, but it was only when they cross-referenced it with data compiled by Scotland Yard from phone masts around Praia da Luz that they could place the 43-year-old near the Ocean Club from where Madeleine was taken.

They then discovered his phone received a call in Praia da Luz from someone at 7.32pm. The call lasted until 8.02pm and the person who called Brueckner has not yet been identified. Madeleine vanished between 9.10pm and 10pm that evening.

Mr Wolters said: ‘ Brueckner’s telephone number comes from our investigation, but British police have a data pool from 2007 from Praia da Luz of all mobile numbers [used in that area at the time], so we put our telephone number to the data of the British police – and it matched.

‘ So we think that our suspect was, on the day Madeleine was kidnapped in Praia da Luz, near the apartment.’

He declined to provide details of how the BK Ahad found Brueckner’ s mobile number in 2007. The prosecutor claimed the BKA has further evidence pointing towards Brueckner’s involvement in Madeleine’s abduction, but for now were keeping some of it secret from the public – and their suspect.

‘We have no forensic evidence, but we have no doubt that Madeleine is dead. I think the British authorities need the forensic evidence for her death, but in Germany we don’t need forensic evidence. It’s enough to think there are no other possibilities, so she must be dead.’

Brueckner is serving a sentence for drug offences in the northern German city of Kiel, but is now eligible for release after serving two-thirds of the 15-month term.

However, Mr Wolters said he thought it unlikely that Brueckner would be allowed to walk free and he would likely be rearrested for the rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Portugal in 2005. He is appealing his conviction and seven-year sentence for the crime.