Older lover ‘dumped Brueckner in run-up to Maddie vanishing’
‘SPLIT WITH GIRLFRIEND CAME JUST WEEKS BEFORE’
CHRISTIAN Brueckner was dumped by his girlfriend weeks before Madeleine McCann vanished after cheating on her with a younger woman, it is claimed.
Marina Flache, who is nearly 20 years older than the paedophile, had a 19-month fling with him after meeting in a Portugal bar in 2005.
Flache (64) told a court yesterday how she had sex with the German in the living room of his ramshackle Praia da Luz farmhouse.
But the furious travel agent split up with him in March 2007 after Brueckner confessed he had been seeing another woman.
Madeleine vanished from her parents’ holiday apartment in the Algarve resort just weeks later in
May 2007.
Brueckner was named as the prime suspect over her disappearance by German prosecutors in 2020.
He is standing trial in Braunschweig on unconnected sex attack charges allegedly carried out in Portugal.
Flache, from Dresden, told the court Brueckner boasted about making money from burglaries.
She said: “He was very approachable. We met in 2005, around October or November. He spoke to me when I was with friends in a bar.
“He was polite, he had money, he was independent. He worked in restaurants and he painted.
“But at some point, I found out from him that he also financed himself from burglaries.”
Home
She explained: “His house was full of rubbish, car parts and various electric things. Everything was lying around. “I encouraged him to get a job, because he is not a stupid person, he was kind, nice, and approachable “He had little to drink and didn’t take any drugs.”
The court heard how Brueckner also wrote Flache a note in 2006 asking her to help cover his tracks from “stupid cops”.