News item

In 2017, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of her disappearance, Gerry and Kate, the girl’s parents, gave a long interview to the BBC. Following the broadcast of this interview, a man called the police in Germany. He indicates that one of his friends, a certain Christian Brückner, would have confessed to him to be involved in the disappearance of Maddie. The German authorities realize that they had already received a report concerning him, a few years earlier. “In 2013, a man called the police saying Christian B.’s name, but it was still pretty vague, relates prosecutor Hans-Christian Wolters. There were no other suspicious items. He was presented as a witness. It was pretty quick because Christian B. said he wasn’t in Portugal at the time of Maddie’s disappearance. And it ended there.

However, four years later, the investigators discover that Christian Brückner lied. Indeed, according to the German investigation, telephone recordings identified the suspect near the hotel complex where the girl slept on the evening of her disappearance. For German justice, he would clearly have the profile of Maddie’s kidnapper. Christian Brückner has already been sentenced to 24 months in prison when he was only 17 years old, for the sexual assault of a 6-year-old girl in Germany. On his release from detention, he joined Praia da Luz, in the south of Portugal, where he saw odd jobs but also larceny. In 2006, he was imprisoned in a Portuguese prison for stealing diesel from trucks.