The Braunschweig court has acquitted Christian Brueckner, the main suspect for years in the kidnapping and murder of little Maddie McCann, of other rape charges, including those against minors. The man, 47, will remain in prison until September 2025, serving a sentence for sexual assault.
Maddie McCann is the three-year-old girl who disappeared in May 2007 while on holiday with her parents in Portugal.
Brueckner was in Portugal at the time, and in 2020 he told his cellmate in Germany about the kidnapping of a little girl found in an apartment in the Algarve in Portugal during an attempted burglary. He told him a story that bore great similarities to the night Maddie disappeared and asked, “Can a child’s DNA be taken from bones in the ground?”
The man, defined as a “serial rapist” by the Prosecutor's Office, which had requested a 15-year sentence for other crimes committed in Portugal between 2000 and 2017 (including the rapes of an elderly woman and a teenager), was therefore acquitted of all charges. He was never charged in the Maddie McCann case.
(Online Union)