Christian Brückner linked to Madeleine McCann via email account, court hears
An email account which links rapist Christian Brückner to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann has been discovered by police, a German court was told yesterday.
Titus Stampa, a police detective, said investigators found a Hotmail account and hard drive belonging to Brückner which were “related to the killing”, referring to her 2007 disappearance.
“An external hard drive also belonging to the killing case, and I am not allowed to talk about it,” he told a court in Braunschweig, in comments reported by the Daily Mirror, during a trial of Brückner on unrelated sex offences.
He declined to give any further details, such as of any photographs or video files which implicated Brückner, who was identified in 2020 by German authorities as a suspect in the case of McCann’s disappearance.
It is the first time German authorities have disclosed some detail of the evidence they hold against Brückner in the McCann case.
Mr Stampa, who said he could not further discuss the email account as it was related to a different criminal case, went on to describe a second email account in which Brückner shared child abuse content with other predators.
He told the court that Brückner had deleted all the emails in that account dating to early 2007, when Madeleine vanished from a hotel resort in Praia da Luz, in Portugal.
“I can remember that things were massively deleted in the inbox. There was nothing in there from January 2007,” he told the court in Braunschweig.
Mr Stampa also referred to an email allegedly written by Brückner involving a fantasy of a young girl and her mother being kidnapped and abused. “It was about violence and brutality and them being abused sexually,” he said.
Brückner is on trial in Braunschweig facing three charges of rape and two charges of child sexual abuse which are unrelated to the McCann disappearance.
His lawyers say he denies those charges.
If convicted in the Braunschweig trial, he faces a maximum sentence of 15 years on top of his current rape sentence, for which he is due for release at the end of 2025.
Camper van
Brückner was living in a T3 Westfalia camper van near the area where Madeleine, who German prosecutors suspect is dead, disappeared. British detectives say they continue to treat the case as a missing person investigation.
German prosecutors also say that phone records show Brückner receiving a call on May 3 2007 near the Ocean Club resort, where the McCann family had been staying. He insists he was several miles away with a young woman at the time.
Last May, detectives investigating the Madeleine case said they were searching a Portuguese reservoir for more evidence, in the first dig of that nature in Praia de Luz since 2014.
The search of the Arade man-made reservoir, near Silves, ended after three days with investigators taking material from the area for further analysis. Scotland Yard detectives reportedly travelled to Portugal to take part in the search.
Brückner denies any involvement in the disappearance of Madeleine and has not been charged with that offence.
His lawyers have said he cannot receive a fair trial in the Braunschweig case as German prosecutors have “created a worldwide sense of pillory against our client”.
He is currently serving a seven-year sentence for raping an American pensioner in the same resort town where Madeleine vanished. The trial, which is expected to last until October, continues.
