Details of identity limited due to strict privacy laws

Releasing the phone numbers suggests they have strong reason to believe it will lead to further evidence

WHILE a new suspect was identified yesterday, he was not named, despite the fact he is already serving a jail sentence in Germany for another crime.

The reason is Germany’s notoriously tough privacy laws, under which police cannot even name a convicted criminal, let alone a suspect.

The news of a breakthrough in the case was reported in Germany by the television programme XY, the country’s equivalent of Crimewatch.

But the programme had to go through a series of contortions familiar to German viewers to avoid identifying the suspect. He was a “German national” and “multiple offender”, but presenters could not say where he was born or grew up.

They were able to say he had prior convictions for sexual offences against children because it is directly relevant to the case, but could not specify the crime for which he is currently in jail, referring to it only as “another matter”.

Details were tantalisingly few. We were told the case is being handled by prosecutors Braunschweig because that was his last known address before he left the country for Portugal.

We were shown photographs of two cars he owned at the time of Madeleine’s disappearance – but the licence plates had been blurred.

Police did take the rare step of releasing his Portuguese mobile phone number and that of an unknown person who called him for 30 minutes on the day of the disappearance. That is unusual and suggests they have strong reason to believe revealing the numbers will lead to further evidence.

Germany’s remarkably tough privacy laws are the legacy of a country that remains scarred by the experience of living under the Gestapo and East German Stasi communist secret police.

But the privacy laws force police to work within tight constraints.

Police can only release the names of wanted suspects if they can prove it would prevent further serious crimes. But detectives are adept at revealing telling details that make it possible for witnesses to come forward.