Links to murder of nine-year-old Maddie lookalike
CHRISTIAn Brueckner has been linked to the murder of a German schoolgirl who disappeared nearly 20 years ago.
Peggy Knobloch was nine when she vanished on her way home from school in 2001.
Part of her skeleton was discovered 15 years later by a mushroom picker in a Bavarian forest, around 60 miles from her home in Lichtenberg, Upper Franconia.
The town is roughly 100 miles from Brueckner’s hometown of Wurzburg.
Investigators have revealed the historic cold case is now being reopened in relation to the 43-year-old Madeleine McCann suspect, who is a convicted paedophile.
Chief public prosecutor Martin Dippold told German newspaper Bild that, while there is currently no evidence linking the suspect to Peggy’s disappearance, ‘he is now being re-examined in the case’.
It means Brueckner is now being investigated in connection with the disappearance of five children – including Madeleine, three, who went missing in the Algarve in 2007. Detectives are also reexamining the cases of Rene Hasee, six, who went missing while on holiday in Aljezur – 25 miles away from Praia da Luz, where Brueckner was living at the time.
The German is also a suspect in the disappearances of Carola Titze, 16, who went missing in Belgium in 1996 and Inga Gehricke, five, who vanished in Germany in 2015.
The Mail also revealed he has been linked to the 2010 killing of Monika Pawlak, a 24- year- old prostitute, in Hanover.
Peggy, who has blonde hair and light eyes, bears a striking similarity to both Madeleine and Inga, dubbed the ‘German Maddie’.
The schoolgirl vanished without a trace on her way home from class on May 7, 2001, at around 1.15pm. Around the same period Brueckner,
who had recently served jail time for child abuse, was known to frequently drive the 1,600 miles between Bavaria and the Algarve.
Brueckner was released from prison in Bavaria at the end of 2000 – just months before Peggy
‘Maddie case brings it all back’
went missing. He had been jailed on child sex abuse charges after being extradited back to Germany from Portugal the previous year.
The disappearance of Peggy sparked an international missing person’s search which was extended from Bavaria to the Czech Republic and Turkey.
It was not until July 2, 2016, that parts of her skeleton were discovered in the Thuringian Forest mountain range in central Germany.
A paedophile confessed to taking the body from ‘another man’ but later retracted his statement. While there have been several suspects, it remains one of Germany’s most shocking unsolved cases.
Peggy’s mother Susanne Knobloch told German news: ‘The Maddie case takes me back to this time, everything comes up again.’
Mrs Knobloch, a nurse, said she has lived without closure since her daughter’s disappearance, adding: ‘I have had to live with it for 19 years, not having any clarity about what happened to my child.’
The Braunschweig Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is leading the investigation into Bruecker, is combing through historic cases of missing children across Europe for possible parallels.