Sehnde, Germany – The top suspect in the 2007 disappearance of British toddler Madeleine McCann in Portugal was freed from a German prison on Wednesday. Christian Brueckner, 48, who had finished a seven-year jail term for rape, has not been charged in the McCann case because of a lack of evidence, prosecutors say.
He was driven out of the Sehnde prison in northern Germany in the back of his lawyer’s car which then sped off, joined by two police vans, AFP journalists and a prison official said. Brueckner will have to wear an electronic ankle bracelet and regularly report to probation officers, reported Der Spiegel news magazine, adding that his passport was taken away and the validity of his ID card restricted to German soil.
Local justice officials did not immediately reply to AFP requests for confirmation of the reported conditions of his release. Prosecutors in the city of Braunschweig have accused Brueckner of being behind the disappearance of McCann, widely known as “Maddie” — the notorious missing person case which has captivated the world media for years.
Three-year-old Madeleine vanished from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in May 2007 while her parents dined at a nearby tapas bar.
However, a lack of solid evidence prevented them from laying charges against Brueckner, who denies the claims against him.
This meant that on Wednesday he was a free man, having finished his sentence for raping a 72-year-old American woman in 2005 in Portugal’s Algarve region, where Maddie went missing. Despite a huge international manhunt, global media attention and multiple leads that went cold, no trace of her has ever been found and no one has been charged over her disappearance. German prosecutors in a bombshell announcement in 2020 named Brueckner, who is known to have lived in the area on and off at the time, as their top suspect. They have said they have unspecified but “concrete evidence” that was nonetheless not enough to secure a conviction, and have therefore refrained from charging him over the Maddie case.
In June, police combed an overgrown area and abandoned buildings in Portugal near where Brueckner lived at the time, but without so far announcing that they have found any evidence.
