Main suspect in Madeleine McCann case due to be released from German prison

The main suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann is expected to be freed on Wednesday as German authorities admit they no longer have legal justification to hold him in jail.

Christian Brückner, 49, is due to be released from prison in Sehnde, northern Germany, after serving a sentence for the rape of an American woman, then 72 years old, in Portugal in 2005.

The rape took place in Praia da Luz, the holiday resort on the southern Portuguese coast where the three-year-old British toddler disappeared 18 months later.

German prosecutors say that Brückner, a German national, remains their prime suspect in the disappearance, which they are treating as a murder inquiry. British police call him a suspect in their investigation, which they continue to treat as a missing-persons case.

Madeleine went missing on 3 May 2007 while on holiday with her parents. She vanished from the ground-floor apartment where the family was staying, while her parents were at a restaurant close by. Her young twin siblings had been in the room with her.

Hans Christian Wolters, a lead investigator in the case, reiterated in a recent interview his belief that Brückner was responsible for the girl’s disappearance. “We believe that he is responsible for the disappearance of Madeleine McCann and that he killed Madeleine McCann,” he said in a recent statement.

Prosecutors have urged authorities to ensure Brückner is fitted with an electronic ankle tag so that his movements can be tracked, but it is unclear whether the court will agree to this. They have also requested that Brückner relinquish his passport and report regularly to authorities, citing fears that he might try to leave the country.

German police have been investigating Brückner since 2017. State prosecutors have said they have circumstantial evidence indicating his possible involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance. These include that his mobile phone was on and logged in in the area where she vanished, and the sworn testimony of three witnesses who say he confessed to them.

After being alerted about Brückner following a TV crime programme in Germany that called for information a decade after the child’s disappearance, the federal criminal police office named him as a suspect in 2020. They revealed he had convictions going back decades for child sex offences and other crimes, including drug trafficking, burglary and petty theft.

Brückner had lived in the Algarve region of Portugal between 1995 and 2007, and had worked at the Praia da Luz resort as a pool maintenance assistant.

Last autumn, Brückner was cleared by a court in the northern German city of Braunschweig of several unrelated sexual offences, alleged to have occurred between 2000 and 2017. He has consistently denied any involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance.

Ahead of Brückner’s release, his lawyer, Friedrich Fülscher, said in a statement that no comment would be made to the media outside the prison either by him or Brückner.

Brückner has refused a request by British authorities, made through an “international letter of request”, for an interview on his release.

DCI Mark Cranwell, a senior investigating officer for London’s Metropolitan police, said the request had been “refused by the suspect”. He added that the Met would “nevertheless continue to pursue any viable lines of inquiry”.

After completing his seven-anda-half-year sentence for the 2005 rape, Brückner had been expected to stay behind bars until January 2026 because of his owing €1,447 (£1,253) in fines for a separate offence. However, a former police officer who had worked on the investigation into Brückner paid the fine because, she has said, she “felt sorry” for him. She has since said she made a mistake.