Madeleine McCann suspect launches SECOND bid to walk free

Madeleine McCann’s suspected kidnapper has launched a fresh attempt to get out of prison just two days after scrapping his first parole bid. 

Christian Brueckner is currently behind bars in Kiel on a drugs charge, but is eligible for release under German law after serving two-thirds of his sentence.  

While he has separately been convicted of rape in Braunschweig, he is still appealing that verdict which means his sentence has not yet begun – and he cannot be locked up over Madeleine while he is only a suspect. 

Brueckner had previously appealed to judges in Braunschweig to set him free in the drugs case, but after abandoning that bid on Tuesday he has now re-submitted the parole request to a different court in Kiel. 

A German lawyer said Brueckner would be hoping for a more favourable hearing from the judges in Kiel, because Braunschweig authorities are still pressing to have him imprisoned in the rape case.    

Brueckner’s legal wrangling comes after police staged a two-day search of his vegetable garden near Hanover this week, prompting speculation that another of his allotments would be searched in Braunschweig.  

One neighbour has even voiced fears that the body of missing toddler Inga Gehricke – described as the ‘German Madeleine’ – could be buried under the plot. 

Brueckner’s drugs sentence is due to expire on January 7 next year, but he reached the two-thirds mark on June 7 which makes him eligible for early release under German law. 

His lawyer Friedrich Fuelscher told German media that the new application had been submitted to Kiel because that is where the suspect is currently in prison. 

The previous application was withdrawn after a German federal court ruled that Braunschweig was responsible for deciding on it. 

The Braunschweig court convicted him last December for the 2005 rape of a 72-year-old woman in Praia da Luz, the same Portuguese seaside resort where Madeleine vanished in 2007.     

Speaking to Bild, lawyer Alexander Stevens said Brueckner would have reasoned that ‘the court in Braunschweig has convicted me for rape… it’s perhaps not very good if the court in Braunschweig then decides on my parole.’    

Asked about the chances of Brueckner being paroled, Stevens assessed it as ’50/50′ and said the suspect was still considered innocent in the rape case because the appeals process is ongoing.

He added that the Madeleine case could not lead to Brueckner being kept in custody, saying: ‘He is regarded as innocent until you can prove the opposite. 

‘And even if he was convicted, he could lodge an appeal, the whole thing would take forever, and at that point you’re still regarded as innocent in Germany. The two things have nothing to do with each other.’  

Brueckner was identified as the new chief suspect in the Madeleine case last month, but German authorities do not have enough evidence to charge him with Madeleine’s abduction. 

Fuelscher branded the allotment search as ‘pure desperation’ and accused the German authorities of backing the ‘wrong horse’ in comments to the local HAZ newspaper.   

‘The search is a pure desperate act of the public prosecutor’s office. The police won’t find anything about Maddlie there,’ he said. 

‘Apparently, it’s hard for investigators to admit they backed the wrong horse.’

The lawyer, who maintains Bruecker had nothing to do with Madeleine’s disappearance, claims the police have known about the allotment for years.

He said: ‘The site has been known to the authorities for years. So far, however, it has not been of any interest.’ 

Madeleine detectives are currently analysing a trove of items which were seized from Brueckner’s allotment in Hanover after a two-day search of the plot on Tuesday and Wednesday. 

Neighbours at his second allotment in Braunschweig said yesterday that Brueckner had dug a 10ft cellar there which could be searched by police for traces of the missing youngster.   

Manfred Richter, 80, said: ‘Brueckner excavated the floor of the house. He took out the rocks and the earth. He dug a big hole. It was 10ft deep and 20ft wide. He carried out the rocks and earth by hand and dumped it out by the front of the house.  

‘He put put planks of wood over the top of the hole. It took him two months to complete. He started in the morning and worked until evening. Doing this work got him in trouble with the authorities in charge of the gardens.’

The woman who now owns the plot has encouraged police to come and search it, saying: ‘I worry that I could be sleeping on top of the body of Madeleine McCann.’

Another neighbour said the woman was also worried that Inga Gehricke – the German toddler whose 2015 disappearance is seen as a parallel of the Madeleine case – could be buried under the shed. 

‘She is convinced Inga is under there. That cellar was built by a previous tenant,’ the neighbour told the Mirror. 

Prosecutors have confirmed they are probing possible connections between the two cases, while saying that Brueckner was not currently a suspect in Inga’s disappearance. 

Another neighbour said Brueckner had never done any gardening in Braunschweig but would visit the allotment with his girlfriend and work in his shed, before he left the plot abruptly and was never seen again.  

Neighbour Juergen Krumstroh said: ‘I believe the police will come soon and start digging up the garden to for traces of Madeleine McCann, just like they did in Hanover.

‘I used to see Brueckner sitting in the garden. Sometimes he used to come with his young girlfriend. He did not grow any vegetables or plants. But I know that he built something inside the shed because I could hear him working.

‘Brueckner was a strange man. I was not close to him. Although I would drink a beer with him occasionally. Then one day he gave me a letter saying he wanted to give up the allotment and he left the next day.’   

The Braunschweig garden is one of dozens of council-run plots rented out to city dwellers, and a small wooden house now stands at the entrance to the green space.

Garden owners are not supposed to live at the sites permanently but they are allowed to build simple houses and occasionally overnight. 

Brueckner is believed to have visited the garden numerous times between 2013 and 2016 when he ran a kiosk in Braunschweig, usually at weekends with his young girlfriend Nakscije Miftari. 

She had an 18-month relationship with Brueckner while she was a teenager and it is alleged by her family that he beat up and did ‘horrible things to her’.  

Another neighbour added: ‘This is a strange situation because a woman bought the allotment from Brueckner and she has no idea what he may have done.’ 

Prosecutors in Braunschweig – who are handling the case because Brueckner’s last known address was there – would not comment on whether the second allotment would be searched like the Hanover one. 

The sudden interest in Brueckner’s Braunschweig allotment comes after investigators ended their two-day search of the garden near Hanover. 

Samples of mud and soil have been sent away for analysis while a trove of items were loaded into a skip after excavators dug up the plot.   

The allotment has now been cleared and covered in a layer of sand, with fencing removed except for a line of police tape, but prosecutors are refusing to reveal what they were looking for or whether they found it.   

The search team discovered dozens of items in a secret cellar under a long-demolished shed, including a blue bucket, a plant pot, tarpaulin, a string bag, bags of gravel, corrugated iron, wooden floor boards, iron bars, plastic piping, a laundry bag, plastic covering and a tree trunk.  

The potential evidence was loaded into a skip by a German police search team and taken away on a truck on Wednesday night.  

Prosecutors last night refused to disclose whether any new evidence linking the suspect Brueckner to Madeleine McCann had been discovered during their operation.

Spokeswoman Julia Meyer said simply: ‘We do not want to make any reports in order not to jeopardise the investigation.’

Brueckner’s former neighbours say he set up camp at the Hanover allotment in 2007 – the year Madeleine vanished – before the buildings on his plot were demolished in late 2007 or 2008, leaving the hidden basement.   

Wolfgang Kossack, 73, who owns the plot next to Brueckner’s Hanover allotment, told MailOnline that Brueckner had lived off-grid at the site in 2007 and talked about planning his return to southern Europe.   

Mr Kossack said he only realised the link to Brueckner this week when police started digging up the allotment, saying: ‘I remembered his face from the pictures in the news. And I remember his van and his dogs. I had completely forgotten about him up until then.’  

The allotment is only a short drive away from an apartment block where Brueckner was registered while living in Hanover, and the ‘Havana Club’ bar which he is thought to have frequented is also nearby. 

German media says he received at least two criminal convictions from a Hanover court, one for forging documents in 2010 and another for theft in 2013.   

He split his time between Germany and Portugal from 2013 to 2015, prosecutors in Hanover have said. 

Speaking to MailOnline, neighbour Mr Kossack said: ‘Christian Brueckner had the garden next to mine. He arrived in 2007 and left within a year. He told me that he was living off the grid, that he had not registered with the authorities – no one knew he was there.

‘He never did any gardening. He did not plant anything or try to grow anything. He just sat around drinking beer.

‘At the time there was a building on the garden. It was a small wooden structure with only one room to keep tools and other things but it had a kitchen.

‘The building was not really a house, you might call it a shed. But it had a cellar and underneath there would be foundations. This building was destroyed in 2008.’   

He added: ‘I feel so sorry for the parents of Madeleine McCann. I hope they can find out what happened to their daughter.’  

Brueckner, a career criminal, was identified as the new lead suspect in June after German police released a trove of new evidence including details of his cars and phone numbers, urging people to come forward with new tip-offs.  

Investigators in Germany said at the time that Madeleine was assumed to be dead, going further than British police who are still treating the toddler’s disappearance as a missing-person case. 

Madeleine’s parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, last month denied receiving a letter from German investigators stating that ‘there is evidence or proof’ Madeleine is dead.

German prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters, who is leading the German investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance, said that a letter had been written to the couple, but would not reveal what it said.

Mr Wolters said prosecutors have ‘concrete evidence’, but not ‘forensic evidence’ that Madeleine was killed by the suspect and may ‘know more’ than Scotland Yard, who are still treating the case as a missing person investigation.

The Metropolitan Police maintain their active investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance, Operation Grange, is a missing person inquiry as there is no ‘definitive evidence whether Madeleine is alive or dead’.

In the days after the renewed appeal, Scotland Yard said they received hundreds of tips to their Operation Grange team. 

Portuguese authorities are also continuing their investigation and earlier this month searched a series of wells in the Algarve region.   

Police and divers in the Algarve region examined a series disused wells in Vila do Bispo, around 10 miles from Praia da Luz. 

Multiple investigators were at the scene with specialist diving equipment to examine the wells, with the largest thought to be more than 40ft deep.

Brueckner is known to have lived on the Algarve coast and his Portuguese mobile phone received a half-hour phone call in Praia da Luz around an hour before Madeleine went missing 13 years ago – a key piece of evidence in the German investigation.

Police hope to track down the person who placed the call, regarding them as a crucial witness to Brueckner’s movements on the night of Madeleine’s disappearance.  

Brueckner made a living doing odd jobs in the area where Madeleine disappeared, and was also known to have burgled hotel rooms and holiday flats. 

He has not yet spoken to investigators, who say they are convinced that he has committed other sex attacks. 

Madeleine went missing from her family’s holiday apartment in the Portuguese holiday resort of Praia da Luz on May 3, 2007, a few days before her fourth birthday, as her parents dined with friends at a nearby tapas bar.

Despite a huge international manhunt, no trace of her has been found, nor has anyone been charged over her disappearance.

In September 2007, Gerry and Kate McCann were questioned by police as formal suspects. The following July, the Portuguese police dropped their investigation because of a lack of evidence and cleared the McCanns of any involvement.

The UK government has continued to fund Scotland Yard’s investigation despite increasing doubts over whether the case would ever be solved.  

The McCanns’ lawyer Rogerio Alves said police have only 22 more months to nail down the case because of a 15-year statute of limitations in Portugal. 

Speaking on McCann: The Hunt for the Prime Suspect on ITV, Alves said: ‘We have a 15 years time barrier, even to manslaughter, to homicide, to certain sexual offences — and even to the most serious kind of kidnapping.

‘So we are still on time. But time is getting short now.’ 

Brueckner’s name has also been mentioned in connection with other missing children, some of whom vanished in similar circumstances to Madeleine. 

In one case, five-year-old Inga Gehricke vanished from a forest in Saxony-Anhalt in 2015 and prosecutors confirmed they were probing possible connections to the McCann case, while saying that Brueckner was not currently a suspect. 

He reportedly had a property in the town of Neuwegersleben, around 60 miles south-west of Stendal when Inga went missing. 

Separately, the family of German six-year-old René Hasse, who went missing in the Algarve in 1996, revealed that police are re-investigating the case for the first time in 20 years. 

Dutch police have also prepared a dossier for German police to look for a possible link to the disappearance of seven-year-old Jair Soares in 2005. 

Jair went missing when he went to buy chips near the town of Monster in the South Holland province of the country on August 4, 1995. 

A spokesman for police in The Hague confirmed that after announcing their intention to exchange information they have now presented the case and ‘were in talks’.

He said: ‘Presenting the case means that we look if there are any similarities between the cases. So we look for clues that connect them.’