Madeleine McCann witness ‘dying of cancer’

Man who claims suspect hinted his involvement in abduction is unlikely to live long, a court has heard

A CENTRAL witness in the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann has life-threatening cancer, a court heard yesterday.

Helge Busching has intestinal cancer and is not expected to live long, a friend of his told the court during the trial of Christian Brueckner in Germany. Brueckner is the chief suspect in the

McCann case but this trial is unrelated.

Mr Busching is the prosecution’s key witness in the current trial, in which Mr Brueckner is accused of five counts of sexual assault in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.

Mr Busching, 53, claims to have found home-made tapes in Mr Brueckner’s home in 2006 that showed him raping two women. On Wednesday, he described the details of the tapes to the court, saying that Mr Brueckner wore a balaclava but took it off to reveal his face. The tapes no longer exist and the police have never seen them.

Mr Busching also told the court that Mr Brueckner hinted to him during a meeting in 2008 that he had been involved in the abduction of Madeleine, telling him “she didn’t even scream”.

Yesterday, Michael Tatschl, another witness in the case, said Mr Busching has cancer, in comments reported by Sky News: “When we spoke... on the phone, we discussed general things including his cancer. It’s pretty bad. He got his diagnosis just a couple of months ago.”

Mr Tatschl told the court that he often stayed overnight at Mr Brueckner’s house in Praia da Luz, the town where Madeleine went missing in 2007.

Mr Tatschl described their relationship as “friends and partners in crime”. He said that he saw a whip, several pairs of handcuffs and a balaclava in Brueckner’s

home. In 2006, the two men were sentenced to eight months in jail in Portugal for stealing diesel from a lorry. During their time in prison, Mr Brueckner told him that he had held a young

‘When we spoke... we discussed general things including his cancer. It’s pretty bad.’

woman captive for several days, Mr Tatschl said.

Prosecutors opened the investigation into Mr Brueckner on suspicion of murdering Madeleine in 2020, but have yet to bring the case to court, perhaps suggesting they do not have enough evidence to charge him. Mr Busching is set to appear in court again in June. The trial is scheduled to last until October.

It is has been almost 20 years since Madeleine was reported missing from the vacation apartment rented by her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, in the town of Praia da Luz in the Algarve.

But before long police in Portugal scaled down local searches, saying the case had become an international investigation. In 2012, British police said they believed Madeleine could still be alive and released a picture of what she might look like as a 9-year-old.

A year later, launched Operation

Grange, after two years of reviewing the investigation. Police say they had identified 38 people of interest, including 12 Britons. In 2015 the UK said the investigation had cost more than 10 million pounds. A month later, police reduced the number of officers working on the case from 29 to four.

In 2020 Police in Germany announced that Madeleine was presumed dead and a German man convicted of a rape committed in Portugal in 2005 was a suspect.

In 2022 Mr Brueckner, the German inmate, was named as a formal suspect by Portuguese authorities. He was allegedly in the area where Madeleine disappeared in 2007.