McCann suspect feared a serial sex offender
German drifter believed to have carried out attacks on long journeys STEVE BIRD and JUSTIN HUGGLER
The prime suspect in the Madeleine McCann case is feared to have committed numerous sex offences on regular trips across Europe as he drove between Germany and Portugal for more than two decades.
Christian Brückner, 43, is known to have frequently driven the 2,575km between his native Bavaria and the Algarve, via France and Spain, and possibly Switzerland and Belgium.
It is feared the convicted rapist, burglar and drug dealer could have used the trip, which would have taken up to two days, to scout for victims.
He is believed to have shunned flying to avoid airport passport control where any outstanding arrest warrants as well as details about his previous crimes, including sex offences against children, would have been flagged up.
The full extent of his nomadic lifestyle, which began with a backpacking trip to Portugal in his late teens, has meant he either lived in, or had been jailed for crimes in, various countries,, including Germany, Italy and Portugal.
David Wilson, an emeritus professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, said Brückner, who has been convicted for both paedophile and gerontophile (those sexually attracted to the elderly) crimes, was likely to have found his extreme sexual urges emerging throughout his life.
“The key thing we are dealing with here is a man who has very fluid sexual interests; from the very young to the old and vulnerable,” said Wilson. “That implies a lack of sexual confidence to establish a relationship with an age-appropriate person.
“So those behaviours and that sexual insecurity would have existed for a very long period of time and would have found ways to express themselves on a number of occasions and in different ways. And, because he himself recognises the opprobrium that is attached to his sexual interests, he very much lived a mobile lifestyle.
“He would never be able to put down roots because ultimately his sexual fantasies would have to come to the fore. When that happens, there would have been a lot of gossip which would have meant he would have to move on.
“It’s absolutely right to think he would have offended in those places he moved, whether in Germany, Portugal, or anywhere in between.”
In 1995, aged just 18, Brückner first travelled to the Algarve shortly after getting his driving licence. More importantly, he was escaping from part of a two-year youth court sentence for sexually assaulting two children, a boy and a girl.
He travelled with his German girlfriend on a backpacking trip that saw them camp wild wherever they chose. It is likely he grew increasingly attracted to the anonymity an itinerant lifestyle can provide.
Unlike the small town where he grew up, being passed from pillar to post within the care system, including in secure accommodation for problem teenagers where his every move was monitored, out on the road he enjoyed a degree of obscurity. It is also probable he realised how holidaymakers in the French and Spanish resorts he visited, at best, were easy targets for petty thefts and, at worst, offered potential victims for sex crimes.
A year after Brückner arrived in the Algarve, six-year-old René Hasee, from Elsdorf, Germany, disappeared on June 21 1996, while on holiday in Aljezur, about 40km from Praia da Luz where Madeleine McCann would later disappear.
His parents lost sight of him after he ran ahead to the beach. Only some of his clothes lay on the sands where he had been. Last week, German detectives arrived at the home of Andreas Hasee, René’s father, and said they were looking again into the disappearance.
The announcement came as a shock because the last time police had visited was 20 years ago. He told a local newspaper how over the years he had come to accept his son had drowned. While the Federal Criminal Police Office refused to comment on whether the decision to name Brückner as a suspect in the Madeleine McCann case had any bearing on the boy’s case being reopened, Hasee told reporters: “There could be a connection.”
The northerly route between Brückner’s native Germany and Portugal could take him within kilometres of the Belgian seaside resort of De Haan (well known for its vast sandy beaches and one-time resident Albert Einstein). In the summer of 1996, 16-year-old Carola Titze went for a walk along the beach while on holiday there. She never returned, and her body was found six days later.
The schoolgirl was reported to have been in contact with a German man whom she was seen with at a disco before her murder. The public prosecutor’s office in Bruges confirmed they were investigating whether Brückner could have played a part in her death.
If Brückner had tried to forge a new identity he failed. In 1999, he was extradited from Portugal to Germany to face the courts for previous juvenile crimes. He had earlier been jailed for a series of burglaries in holiday towns up and down the Algarve.
Nonetheless, a few years later he was back in Portugal and moved into a rundown property where neighbours reported seeing a variety of dishevelled cars parked.
He may have been attracted to the Algarve because it was a major route organised criminal gangs used to smuggle cannabis, a drug Brückner was known to use and sell.
By the summer of 2007, his life was truly mobile after he resorted to living in a VW camper van, probably with his unnamed English girlfriend (he was fluent in English). When Gerry and Kate McCann, along with Madeleine and their twins, arrived in Praia da Luz, he was known to have been trundling around the area.
An hour before the threeyear-old vanished from the room she shared with her siblings, Brückner received a 30minute call in the town.
The next day, he arranged for the ownership of his German-registered Jaguar to be transferred to another person’s name back in Germany. He and his girlfriend split up and he returned to his homeland.
There, Brückner continued to mov around, having settled for periods in Dresden, Augsburg, Sylt, Munich, Hannover and Braunschweig.
In May 2015, five-year-old Inga Gehricke disappeared in a case so similar to what happened in Praia da Luz that she became known as “the German Maddie”.
She vanished from a family barbecue in the northern town of Stendal after going to collect firewood. She has never been seen since.
As was the case in the McCann inquiry, Brückner became a suspect in the Gehricke case, but faded from the inquiry, despite it being claimed he had been at a service station only 90 minutes away from the scene.
A raid in 2016 on his property — he was not there — uncovered a Skype chat on a computer in which he stated he wanted to “catch something small and use it for days”.
According to Bild magazine, a USB stick found at the site had images of the abuse of babies. The property was searched again in 2018.
It is clear that Brückner was reluctant to sever links with Portugal. Although he regarded the Algarve as his main home for 12 years from 1995 to 2007, one of his former landlords in Bavaria said he was regularly returning to Portugal in the years before his arrest in 2018. Alexander Bischof, 64, rented an attic room in his property in Augsburg, northern Bavaria, to Brückner before police raided it two years ago.
The landlord recalled Brückner owning a Jaguar, very probably the same one with German number plates that he was known to have had in the Algarve. That sighting adds credence to the belief that he drove through open borders between Portugal and Germany.
Wilson points out that there is no evidence that has been gathered that merits Brückner being charged for the abduction or murder of Madeleine, let alone any of the three other children whose cases have resurfaced since his name hit the headlines.
In fact, Brückner was ruled out of the Madeleine inquiry in 2008 by Portuguese police, before coming to the attention of British detectives in 2013 and again in 2017.
Wilson added: “He would very likely have been reoffending in those places he travelled. But, that doesn’t mean to say he had anything to do with either the abduction or, as the Germans say, murder, of Madeleine McCann.”