Prosecutors fear Madeleine is dead
Authorities believe Madeleine is dead as they investigate suspect
CRIME: German prosecutors investigating Madeleine McCann’s disappearance admitted they fear she is dead.
A 43-year-old German prisoner has emerged as the prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine, who vanished from the Portuguese coastal village of Praia da Luz on May 3, 2007.
GERMAN PROSECUTORS have revealed that a child sex predator is at the centre of a murder investigation into Madeleine McCann’s disappearance as they admitted they fear she is dead.
The suspect, a 43-year-old German national, has emerged as the prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine, who vanished from the Portuguese coastal village of Praia da Luz on May 3, 2007, while on holiday with her parents, Kate and Gerry, and siblings.
The suspect has been partially identified as Christian B by local media, and is reportedly serving a seven-year prison sentence for the rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Portugal in 2005.
He is known to have lived on the Algarve coast between 1995 and 2007 and his Portuguese mobile phone received a half-hour phone call in Praia da Luz around an hour before Madeleine, three, went missing.
Hans Christian Wolters, a spokesman for the Braunschweig Public Prosecutor’s Office, confirmed yesterday that the convicted sex offender was being investigated on suspicion of murder.
He added: “We are assuming that the girl is dead. With the suspect, we are talking about a sexual predator who has already been convicted of crimes against little girls and he’s already serving a long sentence.”
Christian Hoppe, from Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), told the country’s ZDF television channel on Wednesday night he is serving a prison sentence for a sex crime and has two previous convictions for “sexual contact with girls”.
Mr Hoppe said German police have not ruled out a sexual motive for the alleged crime against Madeleine.
He added that the suspect may have broken into an apartment in the Ocean Club complex – where Madeleine was on holiday with her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, and her twin siblings Sean
and Amelie – before spontaneously kidnapping her.
A BKA appeal said: “There is reason to assume that there are other persons, apart from the suspect, who have concrete knowledge of the course of the crime and maybe also of the place where the body was left.”
Scotland Yard has launched a joint appeal with the BKA and the Portuguese Policia Judiciaria (PJ), including a £20,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the person responsible for Madeleine’s disappearance.
The Met’s investigation has identified more than 600 people as potentially significant and was tipped off about the German national, already known to detectives, following a 2017 appeal 10 years after she went missing.
She vanished shortly before her fourth birthday and would have turned 17 last month.
The Met’s Operation Grange, which had received £12.3m in funding up to April since it was launched in 2013, still considers the case a missing person inquiry.
Detectives has stressed that there is no “definitive evidence whether Madeleine is alive or dead”.
Kate and Gerry McCann, from Rothley, in Leicestershire, welcomed the latest appeal in a statement which said: “We will never give up hope of finding Madeleine alive, but whatever the outcome may be, we need to know as we need to find peace.”
Clarence Mitchell, a spokesman for Madeleine’s family, said her parents felt the development was “potentially very significant” and that he could not “recall an instance when the police had been so specific about an individual” in the 13 years since she disappeared.
He told BBC Breakfast yesterday: “Of all the thousands of leads and potential suspects that have been mentioned in the past, there has never been something as clear cut as that from not just one, but three, police forces.”
Downing Street said the latest developments appeared to be significant and added that Number 10’s thoughts were with the McCann family “who have had to endure so much”.
As they prepared to mark the 10th anniversary since their daughter’s disappearance, Mr and Mrs McCann gave an emotional interview with the BBC in April 2017 during which they vowed to do “whatever it takes for as long as it takes” to find Madeleine.
We are assuming that the girl is dead. The suspect is a predator.
Hans Christian Wolters, from the Braunschweig Public Prosector’s Office.