Disclaimer: The article contains mentions of murder and assault. Reader discretion is advised.
On May 3, 2007, Madeleine McCann was three years old when she disappeared from a Portuguese holiday apartment. She was with her two-year-old twin siblings at the apartment. Her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, went out with friends for dinner. When Kate returned to check on the children, Madeleine was missing. An elaborate search, which lasted over 16 years, began.
The airport authorities were immediately alerted, and the police assured them that Madeleine must be alive and within Portugal. With an ongoing investigation, the police revealed in June 2007 that vital forensic information might have been lost. According to BBC, this was owed to the scene of disappearance not being safeguarded well enough. In August of the same year, investigators suggested that Madeleine McCann might not still be alive.
According to The Guardian, a former Portuguese detective reportedly accused Kate and Gerry of having to do something with the disappearance. Subsequently, the couple filed a challenge in the European Court of Human Rights. They lost the challenge when the Portugal Supreme Court dismissed the libel case against the former detective.
In 2011, Kate and Gerry McCann published a book titled Madeleine, which garnered more media attention for a case that was already heavily discussed among the general public. The parents expressed dissatisfaction with how authorities were going about the case. They also highlighted that no progress was made in finding their missing daughter.
The aforementioned The Guardian report stated that in 2020, the German police suggested that they believed Madeleine was dead. By 2022, authorities announced a German man who was already serving a sentence for sexual crimes as a formal suspect.
Who is the current suspect in Madeleine McCann’s missing case?
In June 2020, the police identified a German man as an important suspect in the missing case. The potential suspect was a 45-year-old prisoner named Christian Brueckner, who was convicted of sexual abuse of children and was serving time for an unrelated sex crime, as reported by the New York Times. He reportedly lived in Portugal now and then until 2007.
Brueckner was serving a sentence of seven years in Oldenburg prison in Germany for sexual crimes and drug trafficking. In Algarve, he is also accused of having intruded on the holiday home of an elderly woman whom he allegedly tied up, raped, and beat with a whip. The court found him guilty of the rape of a 72-year-old woman.
Authorities also accused him of multiple sexual assaults on women and children. Hazel Behan, an Irish woman, claimed that Brueckner had raped her in her apartment in Portugal in June 2004. The Sun reported that only a few days before Madeleine McCann disappeared, Christian Brueckner allegedly snatched a child from the beach and forced her to perform sexual acts on him.
The British government disclosed in September 2015 that the investigation around Madeleine McCann’s disappearance cost about £10 million, as reported by the BBC. In 2023, nearly 16 years after Madeleine McCann’s disappearance, the Portuguese police issued a formal apology to the McCanns for the way they handled their child’s missing case.
The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann is a Netflix documentary series that premiered on March 15, 2019. It revolves around the grief of Madeleine’s parents and their journey of searching for their missing daughter while authorities suspected that the couple played a role in her disappearance.
