German investigators, who are on site together with Portuguese and British colleagues, requested a search of the tank. The search of the reservoir began at 9:00 a.m. CET on Tuesday.
“As part of the investigation into the Madeleine McCann case, criminal proceedings are currently taking place in Portugal. We will not release any further information at this time,” the public prosecutor’s office in Braunschweig, Germany, said.
Maddie, then three, disappeared on May 3, 2007, during a family vacation in Praia de Luz in Portugal’s Algarve region, while her parents were having dinner. The main suspect in her kidnapping, German citizen Christian Brückner, also lived in the same place.
The German prosecutor’s office has been convinced of Brückner’s guilt for a long time. Last May, prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters said he was certain the girl had been murdered and that Brückner had done it. “We found some new facts, some new evidence, not forensic evidence, but evidence,” he said.
On the day of the girl’s disappearance, Brückner was driving a white and yellow Volkswagen Westfalia motorhome, which was seen close to where Madeleine was last seen. In addition, witnesses described to police that they saw a toddler with a man matching the description of the German.
Additionally, phone records obtained by German police link Brückner to the location of McCann’s disappearance. At the same time, the suspect claimed that he was with another German woman a few kilometers away and denied that he had anything to do with the girl’s disappearance.
Photo: With Police
Missing Madeileine McCann
Brückner was born in 1976 and moved to Portugal as a teenager. In April last year, he ended up in prison for the rape and subsequent murder of a 72-year-old woman in 2005. He committed this act in the same resort where Madeleine McCann disappeared.
In Germany, they issued an arrest warrant for a man suspected in the case of the disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine
Foreign
