Police receive hundreds of tip-offs after Madeleine McCann suspect is identified

Detectives say they have received hundreds of tip-offs from the public after releasing information about a man possibly involved in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

German national Christian Brueckner, 43, is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for raping an American woman, 72, in Portugal. He is known to have lived on the Algarve coast, and his Portuguese mobile received a half-hour phone call in Praia da Luz around an hour before Madeleine, three, went missing on May 3 2007.

He is also believed to have been living in a distinctive early 1980s VW T3 Westfalia camper van at the time and re-registered a 1993 Jaguar XJR6 in someone else’s name the day after her disappearance.

DCI Mark Cranwell, who is leading the Met Police’s Operation Grange investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance, said more than 270 calls and emails had been received by 4pm today, after an appeal was televised in Germany last night.

He continued: ‘We are pleased with the information coming in, and it will be assessed and prioritised. We continue to urge anyone with information to come forward and speak with us.’

German prosecutors said in their appeal that they believe Madeleine is dead and are investigating Brueckner on suspicion of her murder. Hans Christian Wolters, a spokesman for the Braunschweig public prosecutor’s office, said: ‘We are assuming that the girl is dead.

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‘With the suspect, we are talking about a sexual predator who has already been convicted of crimes against little girls and he’s already serving a long sentence.’

However, the Met Police’s Operation Grange, which has so-far received more than £12,000,000 in funding since its launch, say there is no ‘definitive evidence whether Madeleine is alive or dead’. They are still treating Madeleine’s disappearance as a missing persons case.

According to Der Spiegel, Brueckner is serving his jail sentence in Kiel, having been extradited from Portugal in 2017 and convicted of drug trafficking. The publication reported that he has a criminal record of 17 entries, including child abuse while he was still a teenager.

During an appeal last night, broadcast on ZDF, Christian Hoppe, from Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), said Brueckner may have broken into an apartment in the Ocean Club complex, where Madeleine was on holiday with her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, before spontaneously kidnapping her.

A BKA appeal said: ‘There is reason to assume that there are other persons, apart from the suspect, who have concrete knowledge of the course of the crime and maybe also of the place where the body was left.’

Both vehicles linked to the suspect have been seized by German police, who said there is information to suggest the suspect may have used one of them in the alleged offence.

The BKA is asking for other potential victims to come forward, while an appeal on German Crimewatch-style programme XY said the suspect was linked to houses in Portugal, including one between Praia da Luz and Lagos.

There is a £20,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the person responsible for Madeleine’s disappearance. The Met Police were tipped off about the German national, already known to detectives, following a 2017 appeal 10 years after she went missing.

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