Germany/Portugal - Christian Brueckner, 27 @ time of 1st crime (2004), charged with sexual assault crimes, Praia de Rocha, Portugal. #6 *Acquitted*

[MadMcGoo]

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[MadMcGoo]

Please continue the discussion here.

 

[RichardKimble]

Paywalled, the judges have 13 weeks from the 8 Oct at the 6th Criminal Senate of the BGH in Leipzig, no new evidence is taken there.The judges check for possible legal errors.

The headline is about CB appealing the DM rape conviction.

Christian B. kämpft gegen sein Vergewaltigungs-Urteil an

Der „Maddie“-Verdächtigte hatte 2005 eine Rentnerin in Portugal vergewaltigt und wurde 2019 in Braunschweig verurteilt. Warum er zum dritten Mal die Wiederaufnahme des Verfahrens beantragt, erklärt sein Anwalt Fülscher.

www.braunschweiger-zeitung.de

 

[Mex]

Yet again the chief proponent of the argument that CB cannot receive a fair trial because he is the prime suspect in the MM disappearance is exploiting her name.

CB has already appealed against his conviction for rape and torture of DM on the technicality regarding his arrest; that went as far as the European court, which found against him and ratified his incarceration.

But worthy of note that always a trier for the release of a dangerous sex criminal back into society – it would appear FF did not appeal CB’s conviction for abusing a little girl in a public park.

Apparently the appeal might tie in with evidence given that the similarity of the rape of HB and that of DM made it next to impossible that it was not the same man responsible for perpetrating both outrages.

Might work and perhaps worth a try. On the other hand it is a dangerous card to play since it introduces the converse argument into the public domain.

My opinion

 

[Anxala]

Paywalled, the judges have 13 weeks from the 8 Oct at the 6th Criminal Senate of the BGH in Leipzig, no new evidence is taken there.The judges check for possible legal errors.

The headline is about CB appealing the DM rape conviction.

Christian B. kämpft gegen sein Vergewaltigungs-Urteil an

Der „Maddie“-Verdächtigte hatte 2005 eine Rentnerin in Portugal vergewaltigt und wurde 2019 in Braunschweig verurteilt. Warum er zum dritten Mal die Wiederaufnahme des Verfahrens beantragt, erklärt sein Anwalt Fülscher.

www.braunschweiger-zeitung.de

So Feb 2025 before we hear anything useful and/or worth discussing. Good.

A break from the noise would be a good and welcome thing. Thanks for update.

 

[frank-cole]

Yet again the chief proponent of the argument that CB cannot receive a fair trial because he is the prime suspect in the MM disappearance is exploiting her name.

CB has already appealed against his conviction for rape and torture of DM on the technicality regarding his arrest; that went as far as the European court, which found against him and ratified his incarceration.

But worthy of note that always a trier for the release of a dangerous sex criminal back into society – it would appear FF did not appeal CB’s conviction for abusing a little girl in a public park.

Apparently the appeal might tie in with evidence given that the similarity of the rape of HB and that of DM made it next to impossible that it was not the same man responsible for perpetrating both outrages.

Might work and perhaps worth a try. On the other hand it is a dangerous card to play since it introduces the converse argument into the public domain.

My opinion

Yes - it appears that neither side expects this appeal to work. As the German’s have said, they have other witnesses in the MM case. There have been years of very noisy witness & victim blaming, so it’s good to have private witnesses.

From a CB sleuthing perspective (on a CB websleuth thread), FF seemed very driven to get his hands on prison audio relating to CB & the MM case. One wonders why the defenders are so concerned about such audio.

Especially for a somehow factually innocent man……

 

[Davieson]

Yes - it appears that neither side expects this appeal to work. As the German’s have said, they have other witnesses in the MM case. There have been years of very noisy witness & victim blaming, so it’s good to have private witnesses.

From a CB sleuthing perspective (on a CB websleuth thread), FF seemed very driven to get his hands on prison audio relating to CB & the MM case. One wonders why the defenders are so concerned about such audio.

Especially for a somehow factually innocent man……

At a guess, because content could be pertinent to another trial.

 

[frank-cole]

At a guess, because content could be pertinent to another trial.

The prosecution acknowledged in court that this was in regard to the MM case & therefore wouldn’t share.

We could make it about a unicorn in court over faking the moon landing. Anything to deflect away..

 

[frank-cole]

As it’s quiet I thought to add some thoughts to see what others think.

In regards to the sightings of the blond haired man with a pockedmarked face/pitted skin. The sightings were at very different times. One in the morning, one around lunch & one in the afternoon. One wonders why CB (I’m assuming it was him) was around & visible at differing times on different days. Could it be that he was lurking around times that he wasn’t working? Or perhaps was literally around scoping out places as a full time ‘job’.
I’m not sure what the vibe is for handwriting analysis, but there’s an argument that CB’s handwriting matches a few things from the restaurant.

Any thoughts?

 

[Mex]

As it’s quiet I thought to add some thoughts to see what others think.

In regards to the sightings of the blond haired man with a pockedmarked face/pitted skin. The sightings were at very different times. One in the morning, one around lunch & one in the afternoon. One wonders why CB (I’m assuming it was him) was around & visible at differing times on different days. Could it be that he was lurking around times that he wasn’t working? Or perhaps was literally around scoping out places as a full time ‘job’.
I’m not sure what the vibe is for handwriting analysis, but there’s an argument that CB’s handwriting matches a few things from the restaurant.

Any thoughts?

From the outset the police treated the disappearance as a 'woke and wandered' incident and treated it as such by failing to preserve the apartment as a crime scene.

Similarly there were reports from some witnesses that there was a lack of urgency in being dealt with and some were not dealt with at all.

Snip
There had also been a rise in burglaries at the resort which peaked in the month before MM vanished – with two in the same block as her family's apartment.

How witnesses saw blonde man staring at Madeleine McCann's flat

Photographs of Christian Brueckner have matched the description of a man seen nearby in the days leading up to the British girl's disappearance in Portugal in May 2007.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Under normal circumstances it is doubtful if anyone would have noted the extraordinary number of observers doing nothing but loitering, but the disappearance of a child concentrates minds.

• Different witnesses​
• - slightly different locations​
• - different times​
• would indicate with a measure of certainty that there was indeed a person of interest hanging about.​
• who might have been entirely innocent but who might have witnessed something of interest to investigators​
• or who might have been carrying out surveillance either with the intention of abducting a child or carrying out a burglary.​

Without the benefit of CCTV the information would not have been almost immediately available to the police so it isn't surprising that the man seen hanging around by witnesses was neither found nor did he come forward.
But there was so much evidence never checked out either at the time or shortly thereafter that his identity remains a mystery to this day.

For example
An Irish journalist and his family who were out on the night M disappeared were not questioned by the police

Snip
Of particular interest to the Metropolitan Police was the speeding pick-up truck that flew past us on the way home from the restaurant and the three suspicious looking men in Hugo Beatty's bar.
It later emerged that two waiters working in the restaurant also noticed a man acting suspiciously in a phone box across the road earlier in the evening.
And one of the subsequent identikit photos published by the Metropolitan Police of two men they wanted to talk to resembled one of the men we'd spotted in the bar.

Crucial Madeleine McCann case questions that remain unanswered after a decade

One of the first things people instinctively do when a toddler goes missing in a holiday resort is check all the swimming pools. Every year, several hundred kids around the world accidentally drown in swimming pools when they wander off from parents.

www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk

 

[Davieson]

Shopping for food/drink? Socialising with friends ? Plotting his next master crime? Who knows?
He doesn't appear to have been a hermit.

 

[RichardKimble]

Shopping for food/drink? Socialising with friends ? Plotting his next master crime? Who knows?
He doesn't appear to have been a hermit.

Given he's been recently aquited, he wasn't doing crimes he was accused of either.

 

[frank-cole]

From the outset the police treated the disappearance as a 'woke and wandered' incident and treated it as such by failing to preserve the apartment as a crime scene.

Similarly there were reports from some witnesses that there was a lack of urgency in being dealt with and some were not dealt with at all.

Snip
There had also been a rise in burglaries at the resort which peaked in the month before MM vanished – with two in the same block as her family's apartment.

How witnesses saw blonde man staring at Madeleine McCann's flat

Photographs of Christian Brueckner have matched the description of a man seen nearby in the days leading up to the British girl's disappearance in Portugal in May 2007.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Under normal circumstances it is doubtful if anyone would have noted the extraordinary number of observers doing nothing but loitering, but the disappearance of a child concentrates minds.

• Different witnesses​
• - slightly different locations​
• - different times​
• would indicate with a measure of certainty that there was indeed a person of interest hanging about.​
• who might have been entirely innocent but who might have witnessed something of interest to investigators​
• or who might have been carrying out surveillance either with the intention of abducting a child or carrying out a burglary.​

Without the benefit of CCTV the information would not have been almost immediately available to the police so it isn't surprising that the man seen hanging around by witnesses was neither found nor did he come forward.
But there was so much evidence never checked out either at the time or shortly thereafter that his identity remains a mystery to this day.

For example
An Irish journalist and his family who were out on the night M disappeared were not questioned by the police

Snip
Of particular interest to the Metropolitan Police was the speeding pick-up truck that flew past us on the way home from the restaurant and the three suspicious looking men in Hugo Beatty's bar.
It later emerged that two waiters working in the restaurant also noticed a man acting suspiciously in a phone box across the road earlier in the evening.
And one of the subsequent identikit photos published by the Metropolitan Police of two men they wanted to talk to resembled one of the men we'd spotted in the bar.

Crucial Madeleine McCann case questions that remain unanswered after a decade

One of the first things people instinctively do when a toddler goes missing in a holiday resort is check all the swimming pools. Every year, several hundred kids around the world accidentally drown in swimming pools when they wander off from parents.

www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk

Yes. I think CB shared in this trust in the 07 PJ. He knew they’d never catch him & he was absolutely right! I’m not surprised CB left Portugal when the UK police started getting involved.

There will forever be these predictable innocent explanations for any CB coincidence. I see it in the conspiracy gossip clubs all the time.

But I highly doubt the minds investigating this would see it in such a trivial way. A man who bragged about abducting, assaulting & killing a little girl has a striking resemblance to the man hanging around the area that a little girl would go missing from.

Looking back, the sheer amount of unsolved sexual crime is staggering. A small seaside squad just didn’t have the skill to deal with this level of serious crime.

 

[frank-cole]

Just listened to a couple of new podcast episodes about the case. ‘True Criminals’, is worth a listen. It’s a very mature conversation & Jim Gamble adds some excellent assessment on many things & something one can quickly resonate with. IMO a charge seems inevitable. The acquittals may mean the prosecution may have to move earlier than they wanted to. Therefore might not be the best possible case that could be put forward. A absolute nightmare for ‘truth seekers’ & unfortunate for real people involved.

 

[Mex]

Just listened to a couple of new podcast episodes about the case. ‘True Criminals’, is worth a listen. It’s a very mature conversation & Jim Gamble adds some excellent assessment on many things & something one can quickly resonate with. IMO a charge seems inevitable. The acquittals may mean the prosecution may have to move earlier than they wanted to. Therefore might not be the best possible case that could be put forward. A absolute nightmare for ‘truth seekers’ & unfortunate for real people involved.

The thing about JG is that he has a long and distinguished career in police work and is nobody's fool. He also comes over in the podcast as a humane and compassionate man.

Snip
Mr G is regarded as an expert in online crime but he began his career in Northern Ireland as an ordinary offline policeman.

Hunting paedophiles

He quickly rose through the ranks and became the head of Northern Ireland's anti-terrorist intelligence unit in Belfast.

Promoted to Deputy Chief Constable, Mr G became the deputy director general of the National Crime Squad, which later merged with the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

In this role JG began to gain his reputation as the UK's foremost hunter of paedophiles, heading up Operation Ore, the UK's largest ever police investigation into who was viewing internet child abuse images.

The operation identified over 7,000 suspects and led to more than 2,000 convictions but it proved highly controversial.

There were criticisms that the net was hauling in too many innocent people and that some of those convicted had not viewed images of child abuse at all but were actually victims of identity theft.

But there is little doubt that the work started by Mr Gamble has led to some of the most predatory paedophiles being stopped in their tracks.

In interviews, Mr Gamble was always keen to stress that, while his work was embedded in the online world, the images and activities the unit monitored were real children who were being abused.

Profile: Jim Gamble

Jim Gamble has resigned as the chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection unit but leaves a lasting legacy to the world of child protection.

www.bbc.co.uk

His opinion on the work being carried out by the German police is quite unequivocal in regarding investigation of the prime suspect in the disappearance of MM is that there is more to come.
"what I would say historically from having worked with the BKA and German police before is, in my opinion they know something and they're not saying as if they do they can't put it back in the box.
They are so adamant in their belief that I believe they must have more than they are telling."

Madeleine McCann: Disappeared: Part 2 – Jim Gamble Breaks Down Operation Grange

Podcast Episode · True Criminals · 03/12/2024 · 44m

podcasts.apple.com

Possibly CB is not the only fish ready for the frying pan, there may well be fatter ones out there.
Real shame if premature disclosure of sensitive information allows them to slip the hook.
My opinion

 

[RichardKimble]

4 yrs and 6 months since HCW said CB killed Madeleine, and no trial yet, we'll be saying the same come this time next year with an added year imo.

 

[Davieson]

4 yrs and 6 months since HCW said CB killed Madeleine, and no trial yet, we'll be saying the same come this time next year with an added year imo.

Surely not, after all, their evidence is concrete.

 

[Mex]

4 yrs and 6 months since HCW said CB killed Madeleine, and no trial yet, we'll be saying the same come this time next year with an added year imo.

Why the fixation on a senior prosecutor who has committed no crime that we know of other than doing his job of public liaison on behalf of his Office?
JG put it very nicely regarding what appears to be a tolerance of an habitual criminal first introduced to us as a "patsy" who appears to be untouchable behind a mask of misdirection..

It is now established that each and every one of the witnesses called in CB's trial were liars or mistaken in their identification; all of whom had been corrupted by adverse publicity of the MM case - which actually should never have been mentioned during the trial for five unrelated sexual crimes.

JG pointed out the value to a criminal investigation of "suspicion based on evidence" and the noise generated by deflection tactics to distract from that.
In the latter the presiding judge gave great weight to the belief that adverse publicity had played a role in CB's acquittal and more said about defence assertions to the court to which it seems more weight was given than the testimonies of the witnesses from the playground in Messine.
So it started with a "patsy" and has now nearly arrived at an acquittal showing that deflection as described by JG worked on this occasion.
My opinion

Snip
With its verdict, the chamber essentially followed the demands of the defense.
"The evidence we had was not enough to convict the accused," said presiding judge Uta E, adding: "We were dealing with unreliable witnesses, some of whom deliberately lied to the court." The chamber could not base a judgment on this.
She further argued that witnesses were influenced in their statements by the reporting on Christian B. The defendant had been "stylized as a sex monster and child murderer" in the media.

Fränkischer Maddie-Verdächtiger (48) stellt überraschenden Antrag

Christian B. steht im Fokus, weil Ermittler ihn im Fall Maddie unter Mordverdacht haben. Von anderen schweren Vorwürfen wurde er freigesprochen. Besteht nun die Chance auf vorzeitige Haftentlassung?

www.infranken.de

 

[Mex]

Surely not, after all, their evidence is concrete.

Thank you for the reminder that investigation has indeed resulted in a plethora of evidence being collected indicating that CB has some sort of evidence against him.

The same circumstantial evidence which is keeping him well and truly in the frame for the murder of a little girl all those years ago still stands.
Nothing found exonerates him so far therefore one of two scenarios present for the investigating authorities

• they charge him with murder
• they don't charge him with murder

and the course of action will occur dependant on the evidence and whether or not it will stand up in court.

We are reminded that the present trial in the Braunschweig court took two+ years between indictment and trial so there is probably quite a bit of procedural work to be carried out in German trials.

In the event of

• making a case
• defending a case

the amount of evidence collected over the intervening period since MM disappeared will be monumental; so how long is that going to take before a trial date is set.
It would seem to be quite a lot. And there is still probably a lot of water to run under the bridge prior to that.
My opinion

 

[RichardKimble]

Surely not, after all, their evidence is concrete.

Not sure he's repeated that line for some time, here's something I've seen elsewhere on here that might add a bit of perspective to the difficulty with witnesses some years after a fact.

The claim that eyewitness testimony is reliable and accurate is testable, and the research is clear that eyewitness identification is vulnerable to distortion without the witness’s awareness. More specifically, the assumption that memory provides an accurate recording of experience, much like a video camera, is incorrect. Memory evolved to give us a personal sense of identity and to guide our actions. We are biased to notice and exaggerate some experiences and to minimize or overlook others. Memory is malleable.

Myth: Eyewitness Testimony is the Best Kind of Evidence

Activities in this unit reveal how eyewitness testimony is subject to unconscious memory distortions and biases even among the most confident of witnesses.

www.psychologicalscience.org