The main suspect in the disappearance of three-year-old British girl Madeleine McCann, has been convicted by a German court of rape and sexual assault in an unrelated case.
Christian Brückner, 47, was acquitted of five crimes in Portugal between 2000 and 2017. He is currently serving seven years in prison in Germany for rape.
Brückner has not been charged in the case of Madeleine McCann, who disappeared in Portugal in 2007 and has never been found.
Brückner’s legal team argued that he should be released due to a lack of evidence, although prosecutors had asked the court in Braunschweig in northern Germany to impose an additional 15-year prison sentence.
Brückner’s current seven-year sentence, imposed by a Braunschweig court in 2019 for raping an American pensioner, expires next September, according to prosecutors.
Presiding Judge Uta Engemann said there was not enough evidence to convict and some of the witnesses were unreliable.
District Attorney Christian Wolters told the BBC they would appeal Tuesday’s decision at the Court of Justice, and until then the decision was not legally binding.
Although he spent many years in Portugal’s Algarve region, Brückner moved there with his native Germany and was identified as a suspect by German investigators in the Madeleine McCann case in 2020.
He had been on holiday with his family in the Algarve when he disappeared from their apartment in Praia da Luz. German prosecutors are convinced he is gone.
Brückner was tried in Braunschweig as this is where he was last listed as a resident. Although unrelated to McCann’s case, his latest rape trial sparked worldwide interest when it began in February.
However, in the summer, the court lifted the arrest warrant in the case, which some observers saw as the first indication that Brückner might be released.
Brückner did not testify during the trial, but his lawyer, Friedrich Fülscher, said Monday that the acquittal was “the only direct result of the trial” because the two rape victims, a young man and an old woman, had never been identified. and the witnesses were unreliable.
A key witness had previously told the case that he broke into Brückner’s house in Portugal and found videos that included the rape of a girl and a woman aged 70 to 80.
An Irish woman, Hazel Behan, later told a court that she was raped at the age of 20 by a masked man who broke into her flat in Portugal in 2004. He withheld his name from the case and explained that he had never forgotten Brückner’s bright eyes. , which he said was “piercing my skull”.
Ms Behan told the court she believed he was her attacker.
Earlier, the prosecutors said that one of the rape charges should be dropped.
They tried to make sure that Brückner remains in custody when his prison sentence ends next year.
However, Brückner’s defense attorney said he intends to contest the 2019 rape conviction.
His acquittal in the latest case has raised questions about a separate prosecution case involving Madeleine McCann’s disappearance.
Legally there is no connection between the two. The judge made that clear when he handed down the sentence, saying that the decision should be taken based on the evidence of the cases in question, and should not be influenced by other cases or media debate.
However, other witnesses deemed unreliable by the judge could testify in McCann’s trial, so Tuesday’s decision could have other consequences.
The district attorney disagreed with the court’s description of some of the witnesses as unreliable and told the BBC that the ruling would not affect their investigation into Madeleine McCann.
Their next step will likely depend on their appeal to the court of justice.
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