Now Maddie police dig up hidden cellar at allotment
THE cellar at an allotment used by the prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann was at the centre of a German police search yesterday.
Christian Brueckner used the garden hideaway, just outside Hanover, and apparently planned to ‘insulate’ the underground chamber, the owner of a neighbouring plot claimed.
German police were understood to have dug down to the basement below the foundations of a shack which once stood on the plot but has since been demolished.
Drifter Brueckner is said to have joked in the past about ‘having Maddie in his cellar’. Wolfgang Kossack, 73, said the suspect began hoarding polystyrene insulation, which struck everyone as strange.
Brueckner’s plot included a two metre by two metre cellar beneath the ‘garden room’ – a hut used for storing tools that also usually comes with a kitchen.
His was the only one of the five properties on the allotment site to come with such an underground space, Mr Kossack said. ‘We are not allowed to stay in our huts in the winter, and even in the summer they are supposed to be just for occasional summer nights. You wouldn’t need insulation in the summer, so I could never understand why he wanted to insulate the cellar,’ the retired electrician said.
Mr Kossack said Brueckner, 43,
‘Trying to hide from society’
was ‘very unpopular and caused a lot of trouble because his two dogs were never on a leash’, adding that one would sometimes foul his own garden plot.
He said Brueckner placated fellow gardeners by filling in some holes in a wall and ‘tidying the leaves’.
Brueckner is thought to have used the German site sometime after Madeleine disappeared from the Portuguese holiday complex where she was staying with siblings Sean and Amelie and parents Kate and Glasgowborn Gerry, though exactly when he arrived at the allotment is contested.
Phone records place him in the Algarve resort of Praia da Luz on the night Madeleine, from Rothley, Leicestershire, went missing in May 2007.
Mr Kossack said he believed Brueckner was trying to stay ‘off the grid’ at the site, where he sometimes slept in a VW panel van. ‘I think he was trying to cut himself off and hide from society’, Mr Kossack added.
The basement was created by a previous tenant who had used the plot in the aftermath of the Second World War ‘to store vegetables’, Mr Kossack said.
Last month, a former friend of Brueckner claimed the suspect told him he had a cellar at a different property which he wanted to line with metal sheets ‘like [Josef] Fritzl’s’ – a reference to the Austrian who imprisoned his own daughter in the basement of the family home from the age of 18 until she was 42 in 2008. Another friend said when Brueckner, in 2013, found out he was a suspect in Madeleine’s disappearance they would joke: ‘Maddie’s downstairs in the cellar. Come on Christian, get Maddie out of the cellar.’
Officers said they had completed their searches last night but did not say what, if anything, they had found. At least two diggers had been used at the allotment, near the towns of Letter and Seelze, where slabs were seen being taken away.
Sniffer dogs, trained to detect bodies, had also been used, as forensic officers worked beneath large forensic tents.
Brueckner is currently in a German prison for drugs offences. He has also been convicted of child sex abuse and possessing child porn.