Madeleine McCann’s brazen suspect Christian Brueckner took time to complain about his food and lack of hot showers in court as he faces unrelated rape charges in Germany.
Convicted rapist and pedophile Brueckner, 48, is currently serving a seven-year sentence for raping an elderly American woman in Portugal’s Algarve in 2006.
He is now on trial again in Braunschweig, Germany, for another series of rapes and indecent assaults committed in the same area where Madeleine, then three years old, disappeared in May 2007.
His lawyer Philipp Marquort told the hearing: ‘My client has not had a hot shower or a hot meal for three days. This is not acceptable.’
‘The last rain was on Tuesday morning. And as for the food, when he is here he only receives eight slices of the cheapest toast and there are always two as a sandwich and on one side a very thin slice, a slice of cheese and on the other nothing,” he lamented in court. .
Brueckner is currently serving his sentence in the isolation wing of the high-security Oldenburg prison, 130 miles from Braunschweig, but to avoid a long commute each court day, he is housed in a prison in nearby Sehnde.
Christian Brueckner appears in court in Braunschweig, Germany, where he faces charges related to various sexual assaults
The defendant Christian Brueckner (left) sits next to his lawyer Friedrich Fülscher in court on April 3.
Brueckner arrives at court with his defense team, undated
‘Yesterday, when he got here, they only left him two small packages of turkey sausage and no bread. That’s all. Each with only 250 calories,” Mr Marquort told the court.
“We demand that you receive a hot meal when you come here and that you be allowed to take a hot shower, when you take it here it is cold.”
Mr. Marquort concluded: “Our client asked us to complain, and we have been emailing him this for ten months, all the prison provides him with is bread and then when he returns to prison after the trial, he does not receive nothing at all”.
Trial judge Ute Insa Engemann told her that she was “not responsible for the showers or the food” but would “pass on her observations.”
Brueckner was sensationally named as the main suspect in Madeleine’s “kidnapping and murder” in June 2020 by German police, but no charges have been brought against him since.
Brueckner denies involvement in the disappearance.
He is currently serving a sentence for rape in the high-security prison in Oldenburg, 217 kilometers from Braunschweig.
To avoid long trips to court every day, he is currently held in a prison in Sehnde, near Braunschweig.
But here his defense team says he is given an unacceptably low amount and an insufficient amount of food.
“Our clients asked us to complain, and we’ve been emailing this to them for ten months, all the prison provides you with is bread and then when you go back to prison after the trial you get nothing at all,” Marquort said .
Last year, the main suspect in the Madeleine McCann case claimed he was being treated worse than the Nazis in a war crimes trial in a rambling letter from prison.
In a letter from Oldenburg prison in Germany obtained by MirrorBrueckner groaned: ‘Not even (Joseph) Goebbels and his war crimes fanatics were isolated like me while awaiting the death penalty in Nuremberg prison.
‘Being isolated for so long goes against human rights… It is the right of prisoners to receive visitors, except me.
“The only thing I see is my lawyer and the guards. They say that if someone else visits me I will get sexual satisfaction.”
Nazi propaganda chief and Holocaust architect Goebbels committed suicide in May 1945 before Allied forces could capture him.
Christian Brueckner arrives for his trial for several sexual crimes, undated
Madeleine McCann disappeared from a holiday resort in Portugal at age 3 in 2007.
Madeleine McCann’s parents, Kate and Gerry, speak to the press in May 2007.
Brueckner now faces trial accused of raping a woman in Praia da Rocha in 2004 and abusing a teenager and a woman between 70 and 80 years old in Praia da Luz, where he lived, between December 2000 and June 2006. .
He is also accused of exposing himself and masturbating in front of children on at least two occasions in Portugal and insulting prison officials in Germany.
Earlier this week, former Irish tour guide Hazel Behan, 40, told the court how she was tied up, whipped and brutally raped again and again by a masked perpetrator at her holiday apartment in Portugal in June 2004.
Behan said she was convinced her rapist was Christian Brückner because of his German accent and his piercing blue eyes that “drilled into my skull.”
His current trial began in February and has heard from witnesses who say they saw Brueckner in harrowing sex videos showing the rape of an elderly woman and a young girl.
Brueckner’s defense has tried several times to rule out witnesses, claiming that the case is unfair and harms their client due to the connection with Madeleine, but so far all attempts have failed.
The trial continues.
