The prime suspect in Madeleine McCann’s disappearance has broken his silence, calling the investigation an “unbelievable scandal” and ridiculing prosecutors in Germany for continuing to zero in on him despite failing to bring charges.
German national Christian Brückner, 44, accused prosecutors of persecuting him in a handwritten statement released Monday from prison, where he’s serving time for the 2005 rape of a 72-year-old woman in the same area of Portugal where the British toddler went missing, the Telegraph reported.
“Charging someone with a crime is one thing. It is something completely different, namely an unbelievable scandal, when a public prosecutor starts a public prejudicial campaign before proceedings are even opened,” he said.
“You have proved worldwide, through arbitrary convictions in the past and through scandalous prejudicial campaigns in the present, that you are unsuitable for the office of an ‘advocate for the honest and German people who trust in justice,’ and that you bring shame to the German legal system.”
Brückner — who lived abroad in southern Portugal for more than a decade — was named as the prime suspect last year in the disappearance of Madeleine, a 3-year-old girl who vanished from her bedroom during a family vacation there in 2007.
German prosecutors have said they have “concrete evidence” she is dead and are treating the case as a murder, though no remains have ever been found.
“If you knew the evidence we had, you would come to the same conclusion as I do,” Braunschweig state prosecutor Hans Christian Wolte told the BBC.
“I can’t promise, I can’t guarantee that we have enough to bring a charge, but I’m very confident because what we have so far doesn’t allow any other conclusion at all.”
Along with his handwritten statement Monday, Brückner included a drawing of the prosecutors in a restaurant ordering a “fillet of forensic” — a reference to prosecutors’ acknowledgment that they don’t have “forensic evidence” tying him to the case, the Telegraph reported.
Madeleine’s parents, Kate and Gerry, have remained hopeful over the years that they would find their daughter alive.
“All we have ever wanted is to find her, uncover the truth and bring those responsible to justice,” her parents said in a statement last year.
“We will never give up hope of finding Madeleine alive but whatever the outcome may be, we need to know as we need to find peace.”