BUNGLED FROM THE START
It seems extraordinary that it would take police so long to suspect a man with Brueckner’s profile. But it’s just the latest in a long line of apparent blunders that have dogged the inquiry – right from those fateful first hours...
POLICE face serious questions over why it took a decade to identify convicted sex offender Christian Brueckner as a key suspect.
Portuguese detectives are under renewed scrutiny after it emerged Brueckner had been convicted of paedophile offences in 1994, when he was 17, before he arrived in Praia de Luz.
He received a two-year sentence in Bavaria for ‘abuse of a child’ and ‘sexual acts against a child’, according to German magazine Der Spiegel, which reported he has at least 17 entries on his criminal record.
The Mail can reveal that Brueckner emerged as a ‘person of interest’ for British police early on in a major Scotland Yard review of the case that started in 2011.
However, even after this was upgraded to a multi-million-euro full investigation two years later, he did not emerge as a key suspect until 2017.
Portuguese detectives have been widely criticised in the past over a string of elementary mistakes which hampered the investigation.
At the time of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance, Brueckner was known to have previously lived two miles from the resort where she vanished and was still living in the area in his campervan.
Sources said that if Portuguese officers had done basic groundwork, including comprehensive door-to-door inquiries, and identified known sex offenders including foreign nationals living locally, his name could have emerged as a potential suspect within months.
Last night, a source said that Brueckner’s name cropped up after Met detectives began probing the case but there was no firm evidence then linking him to Madeleine’s disappearance.
‘He was an itinerant whose exact whereabouts on the night could not be established,’ the source added. ‘This is why he was not treated as a suspect at that stage.’
It was only in 2017 that Brueckner emerged as a potential key suspect, after German police were tipped off about his possible involvement.
According to German law enforcement officials, Brueckner lived almost permanently in the Algarve between 1995 and 2007.
Portuguese police closed the inquiry into Madeleine’s disappearance in 2008 after claiming there were no more leads to pursue. The inquiry was shelved after the missing girl’s parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, were wrongly implicated in the case.
THE PROLIFIC CRIMINAL
According to Der Spiegel, Brueckner’s criminal record contains 17 entries and he has been investigated for ‘driving without a licence, assault, serious theft and drunk driving’. The magazine reported that according to the Federal Central Register, aged 17 he stood trial in Bavaria in 1994 for ‘abuse of a child’ and ‘sexual acts against a child’. The district court of Wurzburg imposed a two-year ‘youth sentence’, of which he served only part.
It also said yesterday that in October 2011 the district court in Niebull, northern Germany, jailed Brueckner for 21 months for drug offences, while in 2013 the district court in Braunschweig, near Hanover, jailed him for 15 months for ‘sexually abusing a child and possessing child pornography’.
He was last in court in Germany in December over the rape of a 72year-old American tourist in the Algarve in 2005, for which he received a seven-year jail term.
Julian Reichelt, editor-in-chief of Bild, said the new key suspect – who is fighting his rape conviction
– is currently in prison in the German city Kiel.
Not revealing the suspect’s full name, Mr Reichelt said: ‘Everything we have heard so far publicly has been around and basically known to police in Germany and Britain for years.
‘We are hearing that there was an additional push towards looking at “Christian B” another time and that’s when the police reviewed all the pieces again and opened a murder case investigation.
‘He has been convicted of child abuse as early as 1994. He was born in 1976, he’s 43 years old.
‘That means early in his life already there was a record of child abuse. And it wasn’t the only time.
‘There are numerous other convictions, drug convictions, driving under the influence, driving without a licence. It is a huge, numerous page-long criminal record that we have seen.’
THE BOTCHED PORTUGUESE INQUIRY
The disappearance of Madeleine from the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz in May 2007 was mishandled by Portuguese detectives from the very beginning.
The immediate aftermath of a child going missing – the so-called golden hour – is seen as a critical phase of a case by experienced detectives. But Portuguese officers, woefully out of their depth according to British police sources, took four days even to issue a description of the missing girl.
They failed to lock down the resort or set up road blocks because they assumed she had just wandered off.
The McCanns’ apartment was not taped off until 10am the following day, by which time dozens
of people had traipsed through the crime scene and contaminated potentially vital evidence.
Ash from policemen’s cigarettes would be found among contaminated forensic samples from the flat. Not all the staff and guests at the Ocean Club were traced and interviewed. Those who were interviewed were not always properly eliminated.
And a photofit picture of an early suspect consisted of nothing more than the sketch of a face with hair parted on one side but with no eyes, nose or mouth.
The catalogue of mistakes and official complacency was almost endless and culminated in a shameful shadow of suspicion over Kate and Gerry McCann, who were treated as suspects themselves until their ‘arguido’ (suspect) status was removed in 2008, the same year as the inquiry into Madeleine’s disappearance was formally suspended. There were, declared the Portuguese police, simply no more leads to pursue.
In 2016, retired police officer Goncalo Amaral, who had led the search for Madeleine, won his appeal against a court ruling that he libelled her parents.
The McCanns had sued the expolice chief over claims he made about them in a book.
They were initially awarded €500,000 damages by a Portuguese court. But Mr Amaral’s successful appeal meant his book criticising the McCanns could be sold again.
Portugal’s supreme court later rejected an appeal by the couple.
VITAL PHONE CLUES NOT PURSUED
It was only after Scotland Yard, at the behest of then UK prime minister David Cameron, launched a two-year review of the McCann case in 2011, that evidence was properly accessed and analysed.
Basic groundwork, including research into mobile phone data in Praia da Luz on the day that Madeleine disappeared, was not done until an elite team of Met officers on Operation Grange were asked to investigate. Although the Policia Judiciaria had this information at the time she vanished, they did not find out who the phones were registered to – even though cell-site analysis is a crucial investigative tool and the catalyst for solving countless crimes.
The oversight seems more critical now, after Scotland Yard released details this week of the phone number believed to have been used by Brueckner on the night Madeleine disappeared.
Speaking in October 2013, Detective Chief Inspector Andy Redwood, then leading the Met inquiry, said officers were examining a ‘substantial amount of data’ from thousands of mobile phones thought to belong to people who were in the resort of Praia da Luz in the days just before, during and after Madeleine’s disappearance. ‘This is not just a general trawl,’ Mr Redwood said.
‘It’s a targeted attack on that data to see if it assists us to find out what happened to Madeleine McCann at that time.’
Officers had so far been unable to attribute a ‘large number’ of mobile numbers, he added, admitting that it was difficult to do so with phones bought six years previously on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Jim Gamble, the former head of the UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, said he had recommended the ‘cell dump’ was looked at again in his 2010 review of the case.
Speaking in 2013, he said it appeared the data ‘wasn’t properly or appropriately interrogated’ at the time. In UK investigations, he would expect the data to have been examined almost immediately, he said, but the ‘complex nature and geography’ had made it more difficult.
The senior Scotland Yard detective who oversaw the two-year-review of the McCann before he retired told the Mail in 2013 it was ‘perfectly probable’ that information that could identify the suspect responsible for Madeleine’s disappearance was already in the Portuguese files.
‘Of course, there is a possibility she is still alive,’ said former Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell. ‘But the key is to investigate the case and, dead or alive, we should be able to try to discern what happened..’
With German prosecutors saying they believe Madeleine is dead, there appears very little cause for optimism, her case now effectively a murder investigation. Forensic tests on Brueckner’s old campervan have not yielded any clues.
With no body, no forensic evidence and no confession, detectives may struggle to gain justice for her and her family.