Maddie police dig up garden ‘where suspect lived in van’
100 German officers mount operation at first light
GERMAN police probing the murder of Madeleine McCann started digging up an allotment yesterday.
Officers with sniffer dogs and excavation equipment descended in the early hours on the garden plot four miles outside Hanover.
An unnamed source last night told the newspaper Bild that Christian Brueckner, the main suspect in the case, had once lived on the site in his caravan.
The drifter, who was a regular in Hanover’s bars and clubs, was linked in June to Madeleine’s abduction and murder.
She was just three when she was snatched from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in May 2007.
The search team moved tons of earth and rocks and felled trees while forensic officers took photographs and collected evidence bags. Residents said as many as 100 individuals were involved in the operation, which started around 6.30am local time and continued into the night.
They are expected to return this morning to the site between Hanover-Ahlem and Seelze-Letter.
Prosecutors in Braunschweig, who are leading the investigation, said the search was linked to the Madeleine inquiry.
Julia Meyer said: ‘I can confirm that the search is in connection with our Madeleine McCann investigation. However, I will not comment on the background and aim of this action or the status of the ongoing investigations.’
The site is a kleingarten – a small garden plot popular with apartment dwellers who have little outside space.
Typically there is a small house on site which must not be used as a permanent residence. Brueckner, who is in jail on drugs charges, lived in Hanover in 2010 working for a time as a car mechanic. That year the 43-yearold was convicted of forging of documents and later drug trafficking.
He spent several years living in Portugal and phone records place him in Praia da Luz on the night Madeleine went missing.
He has also been convicted of child sex abuse charges and possessing child porn.
The vile images were found along with girls’ swimming costumes and other children’s clothes in a motorhome Brueckner used when travelling between Portugal and Germany.
Police investigating the disappearance of another girl – fiveyear-old Inga Gehricke, known as the ‘German Maddie’ – found the vehicle during a search of a disused box factory in northern Germany in May 2016.
Brueckner was under suspicion after Inga vanished from woods during a family outing.
Police found six memory sticks with more than 8,000 files, mostly containing pictures and videos of child abuse. They were in a bag in a hole underneath the body of his dead dog.
Brueckner was last registered as living in Braunschweig, around 40 miles from Hanover.
His lawyer, Friedrich Fulscher, declined to comment on the search yesterday.
Wolfgang Lux, 56, who lives nearby and cycles past the kleingarten every day, said: ‘I hope they find something that will help catch the killer. I have been following the case since the start, I have a daughter who is 20 so this resonates with me.’
‘Collected evidence bags’