Regarding the inadmissibility and non-use of evidence in CB's trial last year. The reporting is somewhat confusing as to the details of which evidence was claimed to be inadmissible and which was held back as it related to the "murder" of Madeleine McCann. As a previous contributor has said there is no official or reliable report of what the court decided in these matters but we can get some idea of the toing and froing from the articles below. They also illustrate something of what the German police/prosecutors think they have to connect CB to Madeleine's "death".
Detective Titus Stampa apparently spoke to Hello! (of all media outlets!). According to an article by Emmy Griffiths of June 6 2024:
"The German FBI has found an email account linking Christian Brueckner to the ‘death’ of the missing Brit Madeleine McCann, according to the latest news during the convicted rapist’s trial in Germany.
The German FBI claimed that they are unable to discuss a particular email account, as it was “related to the killing” of Madeleine, who went missing in Praia de Luz aged three back in 2007. Detective Titus Stampa confirmed that he had found two email accounts connected to the man, who is currently on trial for rape and sexual assault.
The other email account included photos of sexual abuse, but all of the emails for the first half of 2007 - around the time that Maddie had gone missing - had been deleted. They had also uncovered a hard drive, which Detective Stampa also claimed was linked to Madeleine’s death.
He said: “An external hard drive is also belonging to the killing case - and I am not allowed to talk about it.”
Madeleine McCann went missing from a hotel room in Portugal back in 2007
www.hellomagazine.com
From a Mirror article of 26 September 2024 by Saffron Otter and Nia Dalton:
"[CB]is now on trial [he was acquitted of the charges by a court in Braunschweig on 8 October] accused of a string of sex offences in Portugal between 2000 and 2017, unrelated to Madeleine's case. He is charged with raping an Irish tour rep, a teenage girl and an elderly woman in her holiday apartment. He also faces a child sex charge for allegedly exposing himself to a German girl on a beach in Salema in 2017 - and he denies all charges against him.
Here, the Mirror takes a look at the biggest bombshells in Brueckner's trial so far...
In June of this year, a senior detective said they discovered emails on Brueckner's Hotmail account that linked him to the McCann case. Titus Stampa told the court he had no clearance to discuss the contents of the emails because it was "related to the killing" of the tot. He referred to it as the "murder" account but refused to say if the emails contained videos or photos.
The detective said cops found a second account where he had swapped sickening child abuse videos with fellow paedophiles. Brueckner deleted all emails in that Hotmail account from the first half of 2007 - when Madeleine vanished, the court heard.
Mr Stampa revealed details of Brueckner's email accounts as he gave evidence at Braunschweig regional court. He told the court that he found vile images on a secret email address used by the German. Prosecutors got access to the inbox after making an application to US software giant Microsoft in 2019.
Brueckner opened the Hotmail account in January 2007, just four months before Madeleine vanished in Praia da Luz. He was living in a ramshackle farmhouse on the edge of the popular Portuguese resort at the time. Mr Stamper said the German drifter had attempted to delete "many emails" which he shared with other paedophiles. He said the emails contained "numerous" videos which showed horrific abuse of "three or four-year-old" children.
Brueckner also used the email account to write a vile fantasy about raping a mother and her young daughter, the court heard. "It was a very detailed story about a five-year-old girl and her mother who are kidnapped and taken away in a van," he said. "It was about violence and brutality and them being abused sexually - one is raped in front of the other." A copy of the sickening fantasy story was found on a laptop Brueckner used in Portugal in 2017, the court heard....
Back in 2020, authorities announced that they had found a collection of USB sticks linked to Brueckner, that were filled with child
and buried next to a dead dog in a rubbish dump, in the woods of Saxony Anhalt, Germany. The disturbing stash was found when police searched the site of an abandoned box factory where it is believed Brueckner once lived.
Police were looking for clues relating to the disappearance of five-year-old Inga Gehricke - who was last seen while on an outing with her family in 2015 - when they made the grim discovery. Investigators found 8.000 pieces of potential evidence, including a cache of child abuse images on USB sticks that were found under a pile of animal bones.
Brueckner was prosecuted in relation to the images."
Sex offender Christian Brueckner, who is serving a seven-year sentence for raping a pensioner, confessed to abducting a child in Portugal, his former cell mate claims. Here we look at the biggest bombshells from his trial
www.mirror.co.uk
On the inadmissibility of evidence in the trial, according to this article in the Mail by Rob Hyde back on 6 June 2024:
"The legal team defending Madeleine McCann prime suspect Christian Brueckner in his trial for unrelated sex offences is attempting to have a key piece of evidence thrown out of court, arguing that investigators broke international law in obtaining it.
German police were handed Brueckner's hard-drive by an unnamed female witness in Portugal containing sickening cartoons allegedly penned by Brueckner.
Now Brueckner's team is demanding that the Regional Court of Braunschweig does not officially admit the hard-drive as evidence.
Brueckner's lawyer Friedrich Fülscher said: 'This is simply not allowed. The German police can't simply go and secure evidence in another country without any authorisation.
'The Portuguese authorities were not even informed of this. It is as if the German police just went to England and started carrying out a police investigation there and then seizing evidence and flying it back to Germany. It's outrageous!'
Details of the hard-drive were provided yesterday in court by Titus Stampa, a detective commissioner for the Federal Criminal Police (BKA), Germany's equivalent of the FBI.
Alongside details of the hard-drive, Stampa revealed that Brueckner had had three email accounts.
Two of them were used to send pornographic pictures....
Stampa and his colleagues at the Federal Criminal Police (BKA), applied to
Microsoft Ireland in 2017 to try to secure access to the account, which after undergoing extensive procedures they eventually were granted in 2018.
Here they found that the inboxes of these accounts had been completely deleted for the first half of 2007, which includes the time when Madeleine 'Maddie' McCann disappeared.
But when they checked the accounts' outboxes, they discovered that Brueckner had sent a multitude of files with obscene photos....
Moreover, it also included various versions of two stories, the 'Mother / Daughter' story, and the 'Zofen story'....
The prosecution argue that all found [sic] this story on a USB stick which was found during a police search in 2016 on Brueckner's dilapidated box factory site in Neuwegesleben.
But the defence has consistently tried to prevent this story from being heard in court, arguing that the police search was unauthorised and therefore evidence secured there is inadmissible.
This Tuesday, the court heard from the policewoman who had informed her colleagues about a dead dog on Breuckner's premises, prompting a police search.
Here under intense grilling from Judge Ute Insa Engemann, the policewoman Katharina Schmidt, 47, admitted that she had been on Brueckner's premises without any permission.
And she even admitted that she knew it was not allowed to be there, or take photos, or send these on to police to prompt an investigation.
Given all of this, it had seemed that the prosecution then had no chance of ever revealing details of this story in court.
But instead, by focusing on Brueckner's emails, the prosecution yesterday indirectly managed to have the harrowing outline of these stories mentioned in court.
When it came to the third email, however, Stampa said he was not authorised to talk about it as it concerned the Madeleine McCann investigation."
German police were handed Brueckner's hard-drive by an unnamed female witness in Portugal containing sickening cartoons allegedly penned by Brueckner.
www.dailymail.co.uk
It's a bit confusing as to what came from the hard drive in Portugal and what came from the USB sticks in Germany. Well it is to me anyway!
And according to a recent Mail article by Freya Barnes about the ITV doc (16 September 2025)
"However, a major set back for the prosecution saw Brueckner acquitted of the crimes he was on trial for.
All the material seized from his factory, including the USB sticks containing footage of him committing rape, was excluded from the case because of technical irregularities with the search warrant.
Dr Hill [criminologist Graham Hill, a former senior Met detective] said: 'That is damning evidence against Christian Brueckner that if they had been able to put that into the trial, could have been the difference between a guilty and a not guilty.'"
Brueckner will be freed on Wednesday after serving a seven-year sentence for the rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Praia da Luz two years before Madeleine vanished.
www.dailymail.co.uk
se-legal.de
www.thesun.co.uk
