From today’s Sunday Times
Hotel worker may have helped Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brückner
Police believe a member of staff may have told him that Madeleine’s parents were not in their apartment
German investigators, who have “sidelined” Scotland Yard’s own £12m hunt for Madeleine, are trying to trace the owner of the mobile phone used to call Brückner. “We are investigating if an Ocean Club member of staff helped the suspect on the night Madeleine disappeared,” Wolters confirmed. “This is of interest to us. The phone call made by the suspect could be between him and a member of staff who told him when to break into the McCanns’ apartment.”
The call was made just before Madeleine went missing on May 3, 2007. The three-year-old had been left asleep in the apartment with her twin two-year-old siblings. It was received on a mobile handset belonging to Brückner at 7.32pm and finished at 8.02pm. It places Brückner’s phone in the Praia da Luz area.
Madeleine was last seen at 9.05pm, when her father, Gerry, checked her room to find her asleep. He closed the bedroom door and left via the unlocked patio doors.
A working theory is that Brückner used the tipoff from the employee at the Ocean Club, then owned by the holiday giant Mark Warner, to time his raid on the Algarve holiday apartment. Instead of stealing the McCanns’ valuables, however, he carried Madeleine away, German police suspect. There is no evidence the employee knew about Madeleine’s kidnap in advance.
Wolters said police had not interviewed Brückner about Madeleine’s murder because they had not yet traced the person who called him.
“Our evidence tells us the suspect was doing burglaries in Praia da Luz and Lagos [a nearby resort] at the time,” he said. “We want to speak to the person he spoke to on the phone before we interview the suspect in prison.
“We haven’t found that person yet. The phone of the suspect was in Praia da Luz on the night Madeleine went missing. This is from mobile phone data.
“But at the moment if we interview the suspect he could say, ‘My girlfriend had my phone that night and I didn’t have it’. The person he spoke to could put the phone in his hand [by confirming that it was definitely Brückner to whom he spoke], which would mean he was in the area at the time.
“This is the evidence we want before we issue an arrest warrant and then interview him for the murder. It would help the case against him — but we would also need more evidence.”
Kate McCann, Madeleine’s mother, has long suspected that the tapas restaurant’s booking details could have been passed to their daughter’s kidnapper. In her book, Madeleine, she recalled that they were “by definition accessible to all staff and, albeit unintentionally, probably to guests and visitors, too.
“To my horror, I saw that, no doubt in all innocence . . . the receptionist had added [that] . . . we wanted to eat close to our apartments as we were leaving our young children alone there and checking on them intermittently.”
Wolters confirmed that an attack on a 10-year-old British girl in 2005 in Praia da Luz forms part of the inquiries against Brückner.
Nine sexual assaults and three near-misses took place on British girls aged between six and 12 while their families were on holiday in the Algarve between from 2004 to 2006, according to the Metropolitan police.
German federal police, known as the BKA, have taken the lead in the Madeleine case. One source said the Madeleine inquiry by Scotland Yard was now “piggy-backing” the BKA and had “been sidelined” by a German team made of up to 100 investigators.
British police have known about Brückner’s name since a tipoff from the Germans in 2013 although it is said to have been “vague” and lacking in “specific detail”, according to a police source.
Police in Braunschweig, a city in Lower Saxony known as Brunswick in English, investigated the tip at the time and saw on their database that Brückner was a known sexual offender. He was sent a summons to appear as a witness in the Madeleine case, and German media said last week it would have “given him enough time to remove any evidence”.
However, Wolters pointed out the suspect had already had 2007 to 2013 to remove any evidence of the murder.
Wolters insisted relations between German police and Scotland Yard were “strong”. However, one senior German police source said the Portuguese authorities were dragging their heels on new evidence against Brückner. “They blame the parents and don’t want to be proved wrong because that would look bad for them,” the source said.
An arrest warrant has not yet been issued against Brückner for Madeleine’s murder because senior police and prosecutors would be forced to reveal their evidence against him. “We’re not ready to do that yet,” Wolters said.
Asked to mark out of 10 the strength of the evidence against Brückner, Wolters replied: “It is not 10. We need a 10 to take him to court. But it is not 1 or 0. It is something above that.
“The best thing [to solve the case] would be a confession. Or when we find the body, that would be a big step, but it could be possible that we find other things. Some objects that would help. We don’t know what we will get. We just need some more evidence to go to court.”
Wolters said a key piece of evidence obtained by his team provided a “100%” certainty that Madeleine was no longer alive.
However, speaking to the Sunday Mirror, he appeared to row back on this.
“Because there is no forensic evidence there may be a little bit of hope (that she is alive),” Wolters told the paper.
“We don’t want to kill the hope and because there is no forensic evidence it may be theoretically possible.
“I know it’s important for the British people when I say she is dead, but I did not know it was so important.”
Last week he refused to deny whether the inquiry team had obtained video footage or photographs of Madeleine. However, he ruled out having any forensic evidence relating to her death that may have come from Brückner’s two vehicles, a Jaguar and VW Westfalia camper van in the possession of the German police.
Brückner, 43, had been living in Praia da Luz in a ramshackle farmhouse overlooking the holiday resort. He had fled to Portugal in 1995 as an 18-year-old to escape a two-year youth custody sentence for child sex offences. He was later convicted of the sexual abuse of another child and the rape of a 72-year-old woman in Praia da Luz.
Brückner has been linked to at least four unsolved child disappearances around Europe.
He is serving a 21-month jail sentence in Kiel, northern Germany.
@DavidCollinsST
Scotland Yard’s £12m search
How much has Operation Grange cost?
From May 2011 to April 2020, a total of £12.1m has been spent in the hunt to find Madeleine McCann, known as Operation Grange. An application for further funding is pending.
How is it funded?
Scotland Yard receives money from the Home Office through “special grant funding”, which is usually available to police forces for significant or exceptional costs.
What are its resources?
At its peak, Operation Grange, initially run by Detective Chief Inspector Andrew Redwood, had a team of 28 detectives and seven civilian staff. In 2015, this was reduced to four detectives. The German investigation has up to 100 police working on the case.
When did Scotland Yard first become aware of Christian Brückner?
Portuguese police claim they told Scotland Yard about Brückner in 2012. His name was one of 600 persons of interest, but he was not classed as a suspect at this stage. The German authorities passed on a “vague” tipoff they received about Brückner in 2013. In 2017 they received a second tipoff about him. He was then made a prime suspect.
What do the German police and prosecutors think of the British and Portuguese investigations?
Prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters said there was “potential room for improvement” on international co-operation between national police forces. The Portuguese were “slow” to react to requests, he said. In his view the British police were more efficient at providing investigative information.
Where does the investigation go now?
German and British police are looking for a piece of evidence that can be a “knockout blow”. The case needs a confession, a body, forensics, or an item of evidence. British police are sifting through nearly 1,000 calls and emails received from the public since the new appeal this month.
