A man has been charged over the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, almost 15 years since the young girl vanished while on holiday in Portugal.
Christian Brueckner has been charged in Germany at Portugal’s request, a Portuguese prosecutor’s office announced.
Brueckner the prime suspect since he was named by German police two years ago, with officials revealing they believed he killed the three-year-old.
He is currently serving a seven-year sentence in a German prison for the 2005 rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Praia da Luz at the same resort Madeleine disappeared from.
Earlier this year,
Brueckner claimed in a series of letters from prison that it would have been “absurd” for him to have abducted the little girl.
In a string of letters to German TV station Sat 1 that were broadcast in February as part of a new documentary, Brueckner went further to dismiss the case against him, saying if he had been involved, it would have risked his criminal life.
He wrote that he survived as a drug dealer and was never caught by police because he “followed a few key principles”.
“Where possible, only driving during the day so that my battered ‘hippy bus’ didn’t attract attention, only driving on the roads I needed to and, most importantly, never provoking the police,” he wrote.
“So that means not committing any crimes, certainly not abducting anyone.
“Having said that, this was just as absurd to me at the time as starting a nuclear war or slaughtering a chicken.”
It’s the first time Brueckner responded publicly to the various allegations from prosecutors in the German city of Braunschweig, where investigators were working with support from Scotland Yard detectives and Portuguese police.
More to come.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news...e/news-story/e5bcdc3ebda9389f3c969fe0e88f4c05
