by Hans Christian Walters, who is investigating the case, told Portuguese television network CMTV on Tuesday that investigators had found “new evidence” linking Bruckner, a convicted rapist and child sexual abuse, to the disappearance of a child. Brückner has not yet been recited.
“The investigation is still going on and I think we have found some new evidence, some new evidence, not forensic evidence, but evidence,” Walters told the television station.
“We are sure he is the killer of Madeleine McCann,” he said.
Wolters was talking about the 15th anniversary of Madeleine’s disappearance – also affectionately known as Maddie – from a holiday resort in Praia da Luz, Algarve, on May 3, 2007.
She disappeared from a hotel room at night while her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, were having lunch at a nearby restaurant.
In search of the truth
Last month, Portuguese and German officials named Brückner, who is German but lived in the Algarve between 1995 and 2007, as an official suspect.
It was in 2020 that prosecutors said for the first time that they suspected Brückner – who because of German privacy laws referred to as Christian B – was involved in Madeleine’s disappearance. They said at the time that they believed the child was dead.
It was the first time Portuguese prosecutors had identified a formal suspect in the case since the liquidation of Kate and Gerry McCann, who were initially named as suspects in 2007.
In a statement issued on April 22, after Portuguese and German officials named Brickner as the official suspect in the case, Kate and Jerry McCann said they “welcomed” the news, as it indicated “progress” in the investigation.
“While the chances may be slim, we have not lost hope that Madeleine is still alive and we will be with her again,” the couple said on the website they created for their search for Madeleine.
Bruckner, 45, had previously said he had been with his then-girlfriend Madeleine all night, but Walters told CMTV he “had no alibi.”
Asked if his team had found “something belonging to Maddie” at Brückner’s caravan, where he was living at the time, Wolters said he could not comment on the details, but added: “I do not want to deny it. “
Brückner is currently in prison in Germany for raping a woman in the same Algarve area where Madeleine went missing in 2007.
He has been linked to a number of other crimes. According to documents seen by Reuters, he broke into hotels and holiday apartments and was arrested for stealing diesel from a Portuguese port and forging passports.
CNN’s Benjamin Brown, Vasco Cotovio, Jack Guy and Fred Pleitgen contributed to this story.
