Madeleine McCann suspect linked to separate missing girl case in Germany
June 05 2020, 12.01am
The main suspect in the abduction of Madeleine McCann may also have been involved in the unsolved disappearance of a five-year-old German girl in 2015, according to a lawyer for the child’s mother.
At the time Brückner, who has several previous convictions for sex crimes against children and is suspected by German police to have murdered Madeleine, was using a “dilapidated” property in the state, the Volksstimme, a newspaper from the nearby city of Magdeburg, reported this morning.
During a separate investigation into Brückner, police allegedly raided the house in February 2016, nine months after Inga’s disappearance, and found a memory stick containing footage of child abuse.
He was convicted of sexual offences against children the next year and spent 15 months in prison, but it is unclear whether the files from his Saxony-Anhalt property were used in the prosecution.
Petra Küllmei, a lawyer representing Inga’s mother, said that on the night the girl went missing the authorities had registered a car park accident involving Brückner on the A2 motorway near Helmstedt, roughly 50 miles away.
Ms Küllmei called for a new investigation into Inga’s case. “The files were closed only four weeks after the police started work,” she told the Volksstimme. “I don’t think that was very ambitious.”
Brückner, who was registered as living about 30 miles away in Braunschweig at the time, is reported to have visited the property at Neuwegersleben in Saxony-Anhalt for several hours each day until May 6, 2015, four days after Inga was reported missing.
The house was approximately 45 miles from the venue at Wilhelmshof, near Stendal, where Inga was last seen.
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Brückner allegedly had no alibi for the evening of her disappearance, but was not considered a suspect in the original investigation.
In a separate development the suspect was also said to have abused two young girls in his Bavarian home town, Würzburg, while he was still a teenager.
In 1994 Brückner was sentenced to two years in a young offender institution by a local court for sexual contact with children. In one of the incidents he abused a six-year-old girl in a playground before running away when she started to cry, Bild newspaper reported. He also allegedly dropped his trousers in front of a nine-year-old girl on a second occasion.
History of a sex offender
1992 Commits first known break-in.
1994 Given a two-year youth sentence for the sexual abuse of a child.
2005 Rapes and robs a 72-year-old American woman in Praia da Luz, Portugal.
May 3, 2007 He is in the resort on the night that Madeleine McCann vanishes. The next day he changes the ownership of his Jaguar to a different name.
2011 Found guilty in his absence of drug trafficking in Niebull, Germany, and sentenced to 21 months in prison.
2016 Jailed for abusing a girl and child abuse image offences.
2017 Extradited to Braunschweig. Jailed for 15 months for sexually abusing a child.
December 2019 Convicted of the 2005 rape and jailed for seven years.
