A convicted paedophile and rapist named as a suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann allegedly told his former lover he ‘knows what happened to little Maddie’.
Christian Brueckner, 44, was officially designated as a suspect, or ‘arguido’ by Portuguese authorities on Friday, and was for the first time formally questioned about events on May 3, 2007, when the three-year-old British girl vanished from her bedroom at a resort on the Algarve as her parents ate tapas with friends at a nearby restaurant.
Brueckner, who is already behind bars in his native Germany for an array of grisly crimes, exercised his right to remain silent throughout the questioning, according to sources with knowledge of the prison interview.
But one of Brueckner’s former lovers, 34-year-old Anastasia Meckesy, today declared the sex offender had confessed to her in 2013 that he knew what happened to Maddie almost 15 years ago.
‘He said that he ”knows what happened to little Maddie from England”,’ Meckesy told The Sun on Sunday.
She added: ‘Christian is a human pig. That’s how you should see him today. Today I know what he’s accused of.’
Meanwhile, Maddie’s parents Gerry and Kate McCann said they welcomed the news that a German man has been declared ‘an arguido in relation to the disappearance of our beloved daughter, Madeleine.
‘This reflects progress in the investigation, being conducted by the Portuguese, German and British authorities. We are kept informed of developments by the Metropolitan Police,’ they added.
‘Even though the possibility may be slim, we have not given up hope that Madeleine is still alive and we will be reunited with her.’
Christian Brueckner, 44, was officially designated as a suspect, or ‘arguido’ by Portuguese authorities on Friday, and was for the first time formally questioned about events on May 3, 2007, when the three-year-old British girl vanished from her bedroom at a resort on the Algarve as her parents ate tapas with friends at a nearby restaurant
Maddie’s parents Gerry and Kate McCann said they welcomed the news that a German man has been declared ‘an arguido in relation to the disappearance of our beloved daughter, Madeleine (The McCanns pose with an age-processed image of Maddie in 2012)
On May 3 it will be the 15th anniversary of then three-year old Madeleine’s disappearance from her holiday apartment in the Praia da Luz resort in the Algarve, Portugal
Meckesy said she shared a sexual relationship with Brueckner which she initially enjoyed but later became controlling and violent.
She alleged Brueckner forced her to go to swingers clubs and dress up like a schoolgirl, and became aggressive when she complained.
Meckesy went on to say she got the impression Brueckner ‘hated women’, and alleged the convicted paedophile told her that Maddie ‘was ”probably handed over” to someone after being taken and, if she were still alive today, they would have found her by now’.
On May 3, 2007, Maddie was staying with her family at the Ocean Club resort in the Portuguese Algarve’s Praia da Luz, a few miles from a ramshackle property the German sex offender was renting at the time.
The three-year-old vanished from her ground-floor bedroom, while her younger twin siblings Sean and Amelie slept close by.
Over the ensuing days and weeks, Portuguese detectives presided over a chaotic investigation marred by a series of blunders that placed them under intense pressure to crack the case.
Madeleine’s doctor parents, Kate and Gerry, were accused of neglect for having left their children unattended, checking on them every 20-30 minutes while they dined in the nearby tapas restaurant.
Brueckner first arrived on the Algarve in 1995, as an 18-year-old backpacker fresh out of prison, and worked in catering jobs in the seaside resorts of Lagos and Praia da Luz.
But he soon became involved in a criminal syndicate that trafficked drugs, and appears to have begun carrying out burglaries and other thefts in the tourist region.
Brueckner spent two months in Evora prison in 1999 for a minor offence, and nine months in 2006 after being caught stealing diesel from lorries on a garage forecourt.
In 2005 he carried out a depraved burglary during which he had bound, gagged, raped and tortured a 72-year-old American tourist in her villa in Praia da Luz.
The victim was ‘grabbed by a very strong and tall man by the neck in the dark’ before being blindfolded and whipped with a metal cane. She said afterwards that he had clearly enjoyed ‘torturing’ her.
That crime went unsolved until 2019, when, following a tip-off from a former friend, Brueckner was arrested and charged.
Only then did police start investigating his potential links to 18 other burglaries of holiday apartments that had taken place on the Algarve in the early 2000s.
Several of these had involved the sexual assault of women and children, including nine cases of British girls aged six to 12. In most of the attacks, the ‘tall, wiry’ attacker seems to have carried out the sex crimes after stumbling upon his victims when he entered properties in search of valuables.
However, a new Channel 5 documentary is expected to say that despite his horrendous record, Brueckner has several alibis for his whereabouts on the night Maddie was snatched.
Four witnesses have shared their stories with Channel 5 for its upcoming documentary entitled ‘Madeleine McCann: Investigating The Prime Suspect’, which will air on May 3.
A Channel 5 insider told The Mirror: ‘Christian Brueckner has provided a very detailed alibi for the days leading up to and after Madeleine’s disappearance.
‘That has been checked out by our team and fully examined. We’ve spoken to four people who have gone on the record to independently, in different ways, support his alibi. They have got nothing to benefit from supporting him and, in fact, a couple of those people really don’t like him but they have still backed his account.’
Brueckner’s alleged link to the disappearance of Madeleine first became public in June 2020, when German prosecutors announced that they believed him ‘responsible’ for murdering her and said they had ‘concrete evidence’ the British child was dead.
On May 3, 2007 Kate and Gerry McCann went to a small tapas bar metres away from their apartment to dine with friends. But when Kate returned to do a routine check on their children, she found that Madeleine had disappeared
The last photograph taken of Madeleine shows her smiling next to her little sister Amelie and their father Gerry at 1.30pm on May 3, 2007 in Portugal, the day she went missing
Madeleine McCann would have turned 18 last year. In 2012, five years after her disappearance, her family issued an age progression e-fit photo to show what Madeleine may have looked like aged nine (right)
Parents Kate and Gerry McCann will welcome the latest development in their daughter’s case, a source said
In the aftermath, it emerged that police are investigating potential links to a string of other sex crimes, many involving children.
Late last year it was reported that Brueckner would be charged this year with three offences including the rape of an Irish woman in 2004 on the Algarve.
But suspicions that Brueckner was involved in Maddie’s disappearance mounted in 2016, when police were investigating the disappearance of a five-year-old girl — Inga Gehricke, known as the ‘German Maddie’ — who had vanished during a family outing while walking in woods near Braunschweig.
Officers were carrying out a search of land near the scene which had been bought by Brueckner six years earlier.
They found numerous items of children’s clothing, most of them ‘small swimsuits’, in a motorhome parked on the property.
They also discovered six memory sticks holding more than 8,000 files, mostly containing pictures and videos of child abuse.
Shortly after Madeleine vanished in 2007, with the case increasingly the subject of frenzied media attention, Brueckner suddenly left Portugal.
Local police failed to lock down the resort of Praia da Luz and set up road blocks, apparently assuming the little girl had merely wandered off, allowed him to leave without anyone noticing.
It was just one of the many blunders made by Portuguese detectives, who took 12 hours to alert Spanish border police about the missing child, and 48 hours to carry out a basic check of other guests staying at the resort.
Four days passed before they even issued a description of Madeleine.
Meanwhile, the McCanns’ apartment was not taped off until 10am the day after her disappearance, by which time dozens of people had traipsed through the crime scene and contaminated potentially vital evidence, with ash from policemen’s cigarettes later found to be one of the contaminants.
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