Police blunder may have alerted Maddie suspect
GERMAN detectives may have made a significant mistake that allowed crucial evidence to be destroyed when they first investigated the man suspected of abducting Madeleine McCann.
Officers had been tipped off in 2013 about Christian Bruckner, 43, who is the main focus of inquiries into the disappearance of Madeleine from the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz in May 2007, when she was three.
It emerged this week that the detectives may have unwittingly given the suspect the opportunity to dispose of evidence.
A colleague who ran a pool maintenance service with Bruckner in Portugal contacted police after an efit of two suspects was shown during an appeal by Madeleine’s parents, Kate and
Gerry McCann, from Rothley, Leicestershire.
Germany’s federal criminal police asked detectives in the city of Braunschweig, where Bruckner ran a shop, to investigate. Braunschweig police checked their database and found that the former car mechanic was a convicted paedophile.
Instead of carrying out a full investigation before interrogating Bruckner they sent a written summons asking him to appear for questioning on a letter that was headed, ‘‘Missing persons case Madeleine McCann (crime scene Portugal)’’.
If Bruckner was involved he would have swiftly disposed of any incriminating material, a senior police source told the Spiegel newspaper.
Three years later police again investigated Bruckner, this time over the disappearance of Inga Gehricke, aged five. They discovered that he had been involved in a car accident near to where the girl had gone missing during a family trip to a forest.
Officers who searched a dilapidated former factory owned by Bruckner outside Neuwegersleben, southeast of Hanover, discovered dead dogs across the site, some buried so that their heads still protruded.
When The Times visited this week, the dozen buildings were filled with computer equipment, broken household electrical items, car parts, mattresses, boxes of old crockery and hundreds of empty bottles of spirits. Graffiti sprayed on a wall read: ‘‘My girlfriend lied to me, betrayed to me, taught me to hate.’’
Bruckner had stayed with Nakscije Miftari, his then 17-yearold girlfriend, at a garden colony – a settlement with community gardens – on the outskirts of Braunschweig. When police visited they discovered he had been gone for a month.
Bruckner was jailed for 15 months in 2017 for possessing images of child abuse found at the factory but was not formally a suspect in the Inga Gehricke case.
His peripatetic lifestyle has led to suggestions that he may have been involved in the disappearances of children and the murder of women across Europe.
In 2010 he was investigated by police over the murder of Monika Pawlak, 24, in Hanover, where Bruckner had been living with a prostitute. Last year he was convicted of raping a 72-year-old woman in 2005. The attack took place close to the McCann family’s holiday apartment.
Critics have said Bruckner had been given paltry sentences for the most recent of his estimated 17 convictions.
‘‘I got nine years for manslaughter and people like that keep getting out after a couple of years,’’ one neighbour who used to buy beer in a kiosk Bruckner ran in Braunschweig said on Friday. ‘‘The justice authorities failed. People like that should stay locked away. They keep reoffending because the urge stays in them even if you put them through psychiatric treatment and give them pills to suppress it. When they get out, who can guarantee that they’ll keep on taking the pills? No-one.’’
The Times