German prosecutors said they have charged a 45-year-old German man, who is a suspect in the Madeleine McCann case, with several sexual offences he allegedly committed in Portugal between 28 December 2000 and 11 June 2017.
Police in Germany had announced in 2020 they were investigating Christian Brückner in connection with the disappearance of Madeleine, who went missing from her family’s Portuguese holiday flat in May 2007.
A statement released on Tuesday by the prosecutor’s office in the German city of Braunschweig said: “The accused is the same person against whom charges were brought in connection with the disappearance of the then three-year-old British girl Madeleine Beth McCann.”
“Specifically, the accused is charged with three offences of aggravated rape and two offences of sexual abuse of children,” the prosecutor’s office added.
The new charges against him include the rapes of an unidentified woman aged between 70 and 80 and of a 20-year-old Irish woman. In both cases the accused had gained access to their apartments, tied up and lashed the women with a whip, and filmed the assault with a video camera he had brought along.
Hazel Behan, an Irish citizen, in 2020 asked UK detectives working on Madeleine’s disappearance to review her attack, after learning that a new suspect in the then three-year-old’s abduction had been convicted of a sexual assault with similarities to her own experience.
“My mind was blown when I read how he had attacked a woman in 2005, both the tactics and the methods he used, how well he had planned it out,” she told the Guardian.
Two of the charges are based on the testimonies of two former acquaintances of Brückner, who described having seen the sexual assaults on a video camera and videotapes they stole from his house in 2006. The videotapes that show these acts have never been found, and the identity of the two females described by the witnesses remain unknown.
Brückner is also charged with forcing a 14-year-old girl to engage in sexual activity, and of exposing himself to girls aged 10 and 11 on two separate occasions 10 years apart, in Faro in April 2007 and in São Bartolomeu de Messines in June 2017.
Madeleine was three when she went missing from her family’s holiday flat in Praia da Luz on 3 May 2007, while her parents dined at a nearby tapas restaurant, triggering a huge missing person investigation.
German police said in June 2020 that she was assumed dead and that Brückner was probably responsible for her disappearance. Nevertheless, British officers continue to treat it as a missing person’s case. Unlike Portugal, Germany does not have a statute of limitations for murder.
In April, Portuguese authorities made Brückner an arguido – a “named suspect” or “formal suspect” – who is treated by Portuguese police as more than a witness but has not been arrested or charged.
He has been serving a sentence in Oldenburg prison in northern Germany for raping a woman in 2005 in the same area of the Algarve region of Portugal where Madeleine went missing.
Brückner has previously denied any involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance.
Christian Wolters, the state prosecutor in Braunschweig, is investigating Brückner for five separate alleged offences. They include three cases of rape and two cases of child molestation, the most recent in 2017 when Brückner is alleged to have exposed himself in front of a group of children.
Wolters said in May that new evidence had been found against the prime suspect in Madeleine’s disappearance.
He said in an interview on Portuguese television that investigators believed they had found “some facts, some new evidence, not forensic evidence”.