Police link hotel staff to suspect
A hotel employee may have helped Christian Bruckner target the apartment where Madeleine McCann was asleep, knowing that her parents had gone out to a nearby tapas restaurant, according to German police in charge of the inquiry.
Hans Christian Wolters, the prosecutor heading the investigation, suspects that a member of the Ocean Club staff made a phone call on the night of the girl’s disappearance to tip off the prime suspect in the case that the family’s apartment was free to burgle.
German investigators are trying to trace the owner of the mobile phone used to call Bruckner. ‘‘We are investigating if an Ocean Club member of staff helped the suspect on the night Madeleine disappeared,’’ Wolters confirmed. ‘‘The phone call made by the suspect could be between him and a member of staff who told him when to break into the McCanns’ apartment.’’
The call was made just before Madeleine went missing on May 3, 2007. The three-year-old had been left asleep in the apartment with her twin two-year-old siblings. It was received on a mobile handset belonging to
Bruckner at 7.32pm and finished at 8.02pm. It places Bruckner’s phone in the Praia da Luz area.
Madeleine was last seen at 9.05pm, when her father, Gerry, checked her room to find her asleep. He closed the bedroom door and left via the unlocked patio doors.
A working theory is that Bruckner used the tipoff from the employee at the Ocean Club, to time his raid on the Algarve holiday apartment.
Instead of stealing the McCanns’ valuables, however, he carried Madeleine away, German police suspect. There is no evidence the employee knew about
Madeleine’s kidnap in advance.
Wolters said police had not interviewed Bruckner about Madeleine’s murder because they had not yet traced the person who called him.
‘‘Our evidence tells us the suspect was doing burglaries in Praia da Luz and Lagos [a nearby resort] at the time,’’ he said. ‘‘We want to speak to the person he spoke to on the phone before we interview the suspect in prison.
‘‘We haven’t found that person yet. The phone of the suspect was in Praia da Luz on the night Madeleine went missing. This is from mobile phone data. But at the moment if we interview the suspect he could say, ‘My girlfriend had my phone that night and I didn’t have it’. The person he spoke to could put the phone in his hand [by confirming that it was definitely Bruckner to whom he spoke], which would mean he was in the area at the time. This is the evidence we want before we issue an arrest warrant and then interview him for the murder. It would help the case against him – but we would also need more evidence.’’
German federal police, known as the BKA, have taken the lead in the Madeleine case. One source said the Madeleine inquiry by Scotland Yard was now ‘‘piggybacking’’ the BKA and had ‘‘been sidelined’’ by a German team of up to 100 investigators. –