Madeleine McCann suspect cleared of rape charges in separate trial

Christian Brückner (L) has not been charged in connection with the Madeleine McCann case

The main suspect in the disappearance of three-year-old British girl Madeleine McCann, has been cleared by a German court of rape and sexual abuse in an unrelated trial.

Christian Brückner, 47, was acquitted of carrying out five offences in Portugal between 2000 and 2017. He is already serving a seven-year jail term 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 defence team had argued he should be cleared because of a lack of evidence, although prosecutors had called for the court in Braunschweig in northern Germany to impose an additional 15-year jail term.

Brückner's existing seven-year jail term, imposed by the court in Braunschweig in 2019 for raping an American pensioner, ends next September according to prosecutors.

Presiding Judge Uta Engemann said there was insufficient evidence for a conviction and some of the witnesses were unreliable.

District prosecutor Christian Wolters told the BBC they would appeal against Tuesday's verdict to the Federal Court of Justice, and until then the verdict was not legally binding.

Although he spent many years in the Algarve region of Portugal, Brückner moved between there and his native Germany and was identified as a suspect by German investigators in the Madeleine McCann case in 2020.

She had been on holiday with her family in the Algarve when she vanished from their apartment in Praia da Luz. German prosecutors are convinced she is no longer alive.

Brückner was put on trial in Braunschweig as that was where he was last listed as living. Although unrelated to the McCann case, his latest rape trial prompted widespread international interest when it began in February.

However, during the summer the court lifted an arrest warrant in connection with the case, which was seen by some observers as an early indication that Brückner could be acquitted.

Brückner himself did not give evidence during the trial, but his lawyer, Friedrich Fülscher, said on Monday that acquittal was "the only correct outcome of the case" because two of the rape victims, a teenager and an elderly woman, had never been identified and the witnesses were not credible.

A key witness had earlier told the trial that he had broken into Brückner's home in Portugal and found videos involving the rape of a girl and a woman aged 70 to 80.

An Irish woman, Hazel Behan, later told the court she had been raped when she was 20 by a masked man who broke into her flat in Portugal in 2004. She waived her anonymity for the trial and described how she had never forgotten Brückner's bright eyes, which she said had "bored into my skull".

Ms Behan told the court that she believed he was her attacker.

Prosecutors had previously said one of the rape charges should be dropped.

They have sought to ensure Brückner remains in preventive detention when his jail term ends next year.

However, Brückner's defence lawyer has said he also intends to challenge the 2019 rape conviction.

His acquittal in the latest trial has raised questions about the prosecutors' separate case involving the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

Legally there is no connection between the two. The judge made that clear when she delivered the acquittal, saying that the verdict had to be carried out on the basis of evidence for the charges in question, and should not be influenced by other cases or by a public media debate.

However, some of the witnesses deemed unreliable by the judge were potential witnesses in the McCann case as well, so Tuesday's verdict may have further repercussions.

The district prosecutor disagreed with the court's characterisation of some of the witnesses as unreliable and told the BBC the verdict would not have an impact on their Madeleine McCann inquiry.

Their next step is likely to depend on their appeal to the federal court of justice.

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