Adoptive parents ‘could not cope’ with unruly teenager

THE adoptive parents of Christian Brückner were forced to send him to a home for troubled teenagers when they could no longer cope with his behaviour, neighbours claimed yesterday.

Brigitte and Fritz Brückner are said to have brought Brückner up “as one of their own” after he was abandoned as a baby, but they experienced nothing but trouble with the boy, who, now aged 43, is the key suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

German prosecutors announced this week that a 43-year-old man, named only as Christian B in the German media, is being investigated on suspicion of murdering Madeleine, who vanished in 2007 while on holiday with her family in Praia de Luz, Portugal. Brückner, who is currently serving a sentence for separate offences, has also been connected to a string of other missing children’s cases.

Speaking from her home in Bergtheim, Bavaria, on the crimes her son is alleged to have committed, Mrs Brückner denied any knowledge of his past. “I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it,” she told MailOnline.

Residents in the family’s small village yesterday praised the couple, who they claimed were left little choice but to send Brückner away to a reform school because he was a “handful” and notoriously troublesome. “The Brückners were a lovely couple, very kind. But what happened with their boy Christian is a catastrophe,” one neighbour said.