ChristianBrücknerwas placid and silent as he was cleared of all charges against him at a district court in Braunschweig, northern Germany this week. The 47-year-old remains the prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, but being acquitted of these unrelated sex crimes could prove problematic to any further investigations into the British toddler who went missing 17 years ago.
Brücknerhas been on trial since February on charges that he raped three women and committed two child sexual abuse offences. These five incidents were allegedly carried out between 2000 and 2017 in Portugal, close to the Algarve resort of Praia da Luz, where a three-year-old Madeleine vanished back in May 2007.
Over the past eight months,Brücknerhas worn the same blazer every day – grey with elbow patches – and showed no emotion, although he would occasionally take notes or whisper something to his lawyer. On the penultimate day of his trial,Brückneruttered his first words in court. When asked by the judge if there was anything he wanted to say, he responded softly: “No, I would not like to.”
Although there was shock in the courtroom when the verdict was announced (and several women stormed out)Brückner’sacquittal wasn’t much of a surprise. In July the judge, Uta Engemann, ruled that the evidence was “insufficient” and lifted the arrest warrant against him due to “lack of urgent suspicion”.
The verdict is set to be appealed – with prosecutors claiming bias. The chief public prosecutor Ute Lindemann has already officially tried to have Judge Engemann removed from the case, claiming she was biased in favour of the defence.
They had argued thatBrücknershould be jailed for 15 years, calling him a “sadistic psychopath”. ButBrückner’slawyer, Friedrich Fülscher, questioned the veracity of the witness statements and told the court that his client was under“worldwide media fire” over claims he “allegedly abducted and murdered Madeleine Beth McCann”, and that theMcCann case “hung like a fog” over the trial.
And it appears that the judging panel of three agreed. Giving her reasons for the verdict, presiding judge Engemann said: “The evidence we had was not enough to convict the defendant… we were dealing with unreliable witnesses, some of whom deliberately lied to the court”.
She also argued that witnesses had been influenced in their statements by the media’s reporting onBrückner, who she said had been “stylised as a sex monster and child murderer”.
This week’s verdict means thatBrücknercould be released from prison in September 2025,when the seven-year sentence he is currently serving for raping an American pensioner in 2005 is up.
It also significantly raises the time pressure for those wanting to pursue him for the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.
“The only way to stop him leaving the country or going to a non-extradition country is to get an arrest warrant,” said prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters. “We have less than one year now on the Maddie case – the clock is ticking.”
So how didBrückner – who has more than a dozen previous convictions for burglary, theft, and sex offences – come to be acquitted?
“There were a few errors in the prosecution’s case,” claims Rob Hyde, a journalist based in Germany who has attended all ofBrückner’s31 court days. “Many of the witnesses that appeared in this trial would be the same ones called at the Maddie case, and many were former criminals convicted of selling drugs or human trafficking. There were claims that they were conspiring against each other to incriminateBrücknerbecause of a drug deal gone wrong.”
One of those was Laurentiu Codin, a former prison mate ofBrückner’s. Codin claims that the German admitted to a near-identical crime to Madeleine’s abduction when they were on remand together in 2019.
“He told me that in Portugal, he had stolen there,” Codin said. “He said there was somewhere with an open window. He was looking for money. He said he didn’t find any money but found a kid and took the child. He said that two hours later, there were police and dogs all over the place, so he then went away, out of the area. He asked me if the DNA from a child can be taken from bones under the ground. I took it seriously.”
Also giving evidence againstBrücknerwas his former friend,Helge Büsching, 53, who also has previous convictions – including for the assault of a female beggar in Brindisi, Italy, in 2011. He allegedly tipped off police aboutBrückner’s involvement with Madeleine McCann’s disappearance, claiming Brückner had told him “she didn’t scream” when they discussed the case in a Spanish bar.
But one of his most startling claims was that he had seen videos ofBrücknercommitting rape. After breaking intoBrückner’s house with fellow witness Manfred Seyferth,while Brückner was in prison, the pair stole various items including cameras and video tapes which they later watched, featuring alleged attacks.
But, the defence team sought to portray Busching as an unreliable witness. Under cross examination, the BBC reported, he admitted to having drug abuse problems in between 2000 and 2010 – and he has a conviction for human trafficking.
Moreover,Ms Engemann said their testimonies contained inconsistencies on the age of the victims, their nationalities, the language they spoke, the position they were raped in and whether Brückner was involved.
Hazel Behan, 40, from Mullingar, Ireland, was another witness, waiving her right to anonymity to give evidence. She was working as a tour rep in the Algarve when she claims she was raped byBrücknerin 2004. She was moved to tears when she described how her alleged attacker’s distinctive blue eyes “bored into my skull” as he raped her at knifepoint.
The mum of three alerted Scotland Yard in 2020 afterBrücknerwas named as the prime suspect in Madeleine’s disappearance. She noticed similarities between the attack on her in Praia da Rocha, and the rapeBrückneris currently in prison for, which he carried out in nearby Praia da Luz in 2005.
But the defence claimed Hazel could not have known her attacker wasBrückner, as he was wearing a mask. And, at the end of Behan’s evidence, Judge Engemann askedBrücknerto come up to the front of the courtroom so that the judges could look into his eyes.
She believed something “dreadful” had happened to the Irish national, but Judge Engemann said it was notplausible to identify Brückner as her rapist simply by saying he had “piercing blue eyes”.
WithBrücknercleared of her rape, the case remains unsolved. No one else has ever been charged and, though Behan reported the attack to Portuguese police at the time, she claims they failed to take a proper statement.
Brücknerwas also charged with the alleged rape of a teenage girl in his home and raping an elderly woman in her holiday apartment, but these women didn’t come forward to give evidence.
There were other problems with the prosecution’s case upon which the defence team seized, says Hyde. They argued that a hard drive “had been improperly seized by police because it was taken from a foreign country” and that some videos which were found onBrückner’sproperty couldn’t be shown as they were “uncovered during an unauthorised police search”.
Brücknerwas first raised as a possible suspect in the Madeleine McCann case as far back as 2013, after his name cropped up following Kate and Gerry McCann’s appeal for information on German TV.
In 2020,Brücknerwas identified as a suspect by German investigators, after police searched an allotment on the outskirts of Hanover in connection to Madeleine’s disappearance. According to investigators, around the time of the disappearanceBrücknerwas telephoning on a mobile phone at a “time and place relevant to the crime”. Meanwhile, hisyellow and white VW T3 Westfalia campervan was reportedly identified as having been near to the Praia da Luz resort where the McCanns were holidaying.
To date, the Metropolitan Police have spent more than £13 million on the case, dubbed Operation Grange.
Brückner has always denied any involvement with the McCann case and claims he was with a woman in his campervan at the time that Madeleine disappeared from the holiday resort. He says that he drove the young woman to Faro Airport the morning after their encounter and that she was later arrested for carrying pepper spray and appeared in court. He asked Portuguese police to verify this claim but nothing was ever confirmed.
In April 2022, he was officially made the prime suspect by the Portuguese police.It was the first time they had identified an official suspect since the incident happened and Kate and Gerry McCann were wrongly named as suspects. In July 2008, the Portuguese police removed the McCanns, as well as a property developer who lived nearby, from the suspect list.
Braunschweig’s chief prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters said: “We are sure he is the murderer of Madeleine McCann”. However, despite citing supposed “concrete evidence”, prosecutors have yet to state what that evidence is.
What is known is thatBrücknerhas been linked to numerous crimes of a similar nature over the years.
Born Christian Fischer in Bavaria in 1976, he was convicted of his first burglary in his home town of Wurzburg in 1992, when he was just 15. Two years later he was convicted of child sex abuse and fled Germany for Portugal with his then-girlfriend to escape the youth custody sentence he had received.
“We knew nothing about Portugal,” he would later tell a court. “We went to Lagos [in the Algarve] because we liked the name. We had a tent with us and camped in the wild.”
He took on many odd jobs over the years, including swimming pool installation and car repairs, and settled in a rundown isolated farm house on the edge of the fateful resort of Praia da Luz. His relationships with women, including an English woman in 2004-5, were said to be frequent and short lived.
He is believed to have served several prison sentences in Portugal, where he became known to authorities for drug dealing and breaking into holiday apartments and hotels. In 1999, he came to the attention of the Portuguese police, having committed a sexual offence against a child, and was sent back to Germany to serve the rest of his youth sentence.
Brücknerhas subsequently been widely reported to have links to the disappearances of other children, including a boy, six, in Portugal in 2000, a five year old girl in Germany in 2015.
He was in a German prison serving a sentence for dealing narcotics when he was charged with the rape of 72 year old Diana Menkes in 2005. He was convicted of the crime in 2019. At his trial, witnesses who gave evidence aboutBrücknerdescribed him as a “fortune hunter”, and someone who “tried to exude something special”. They remembered him driving a Jaguar, and as a man who paid attention to his appearance. “He went around in a very groomed manner, always wearing a shirt and jacket.” Some referred to him as the “Maître d’”.
Just a fortnight ago, Dr Christian Riedemann, a leading forensic psychiatrist, told the courtBrücknerremains “extremely dangerous” and warned that “a new victim is to be expected soon”.
He added: “The application of various procedures leads to the conclusion that ChristianBrücknercan be categorised in the absolute top league of dangerousness.”
Before his most recent trial began,Brücknerdismissed the charges against him as “absurd”, telling one reporter: “I hope [they] will find some answers to their questions soon.”
But prosecutor Wolters remains convinced judges had made up their minds “before the case even started”.
He said: “We believe one of the judges was not open to the possibility ofBrücknerbeing guilty… As soon as we had an indication of this we applied for that judge to be removed, but the request was declined. We think there is a case to show bias among the judges and we believe we can show that.”
“The presiding judge seemed very clinical and didn’t seem compassionate even when very young women were giving evidence,” claims Hyde.
It will be up to the German Supreme Court to reflect on this and decide if this case deserves a re-trial with a new judge.
Upon delivering the ruling, Judge Engemann made a statement explaining whyBrücknerwas acquitted. “We as judges have sworn an oath, and it is to serve the truth only. We take this very seriously but we cannot wrap people in cotton wool,” she said. “This oath means that we don’t have to cater to the views of the media, the defence and the prosecution, or the table of regulars-in-a-pub.”
Ultimately,Brückner’sacquittal this week took just 10 seconds for the judge to deliver. For Kate and Gerry McCann, the 17 year search for answers goes on and on.
