Emails revealing first direct connection between pedophile and Madeleine McCann’s 2007 disappearance found: German police
German cops say they’ve found an email account that links convicted pedophile Christian Brueckner to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, a British toddler who has been missing for 17 years.
The discovery would be the first time investigators have found evidence connecting Brueckner to McCann’s case, according to the Daily Mail.
But Detective Titus Stampa didn’t show the emails or give any details about them, as he talked of their existence at a recent German court hearing.
He said he couldn’t say more because of the evidence’s connection to the killing of the three-year-old, who disappeared in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in 2007.
“An external hard drive is also belonging to the killing case — and I am not allowed to talk about it,” Stampa said at the Braunschweig regional court in Germany.
Brueckner — who is on trial for unrelated sex crimes and already serving a 7-year sentence in Germany for raping an elderly American tourist in Portugal — has long been considered the prime suspect in McCann’s disappearance.
But so far, he has not been charged.
He has denied any involvement in the case.
Stampa said cops had found a second email account Brueckner used to share photos and videos of child abuse — with some kids being as young as three or four years old, according to the Mail.
Brueckner deleted the emails from the account in early 2007 — just before McCann vanished from the hotel resort on May 3 of that year.
“I can remember that things were ‘massively’ deleted in the inbox,” Stampa told the court. “There was nothing in there from January 2007.”
Stampa also described an email supposedly written by Brueckner detailing a sick fantasy in which he kidnapped and raped a mother and her five-year-old daughter.
“It was about violence and brutality and them being abused sexually,” Stampa said.
British police investigated McCann’s case before shelving it in July 2008 due to a dearth of evidence.
Three years later, Scotland Yard opened its own investigation, and German officials named Brueckner their chief suspect in 2020, the Mail said.
At the moment, Brueckner is standing trial for the alleged rape or sexual abuse of three different women between 2000 and 2006, the outlet added.
During the trial, a former friend testified that he watched the suspect rape a teenager in a creepy “rape lair” where he bound his victims and filmed his attacks, according to media reports.
“That’s why I think he may have something to do with Maddie,” the friend, Manfred Seyferth, told the court. “He broke in and saw her and because he likes young girls — he’s got lots of convictions — he took her.”
Authorities also say he masturbated in front of kids at least twice in Portugal.
