The legal team defending Madeleine McCann’s main suspect, Christian Brueckner, is trying to have key evidence thrown out, arguing that German investigators violated international law by obtaining it.
An anonymous witness in Portugal handed over to German police Brueckner’s hard drive containing disgusting cartoons supposedly written by Brueckner.
Now Brueckner’s team is demanding that the Braunschweig Regional Court not officially admit the hard drive as evidence.
Brueckner’s lawyer, Friedrich Fülscher, said: “This is simply not permitted.” The German police cannot simply go looking for evidence in another country without authorization.
‘The Portuguese authorities were not even informed of this. It’s as if the German police simply went to England and started conducting a police investigation there and then confiscated evidence and took it back to Germany. It is outrageous!’
Brueckner’s team demands that the Braunschweig Regional Court not officially admit the hard drive as evidence. Photographed in April
Email account inboxes were completely deleted during the first half of 2007, including around the time Madeleine ‘Maddie’ McCann (pictured) disappeared.
Brueckner’s lawyer, Friedrich Fülscher, said: “The German police cannot simply go looking for evidence in another country without any authorization.”
Details of the hard drive were given in court yesterday by Titus Stampa, detective commissioner of the Federal Criminal Police (BKA), the German equivalent of the FBI.
In addition to the hard drive details, Stampa revealed that Brueckner had three email accounts.
Two of them were used to send pornographic photographs, including those of himself and his erect penis.
Stampa and his colleagues from the Federal Criminal Police (BKA) asked Microsoft Ireland in 2017 to try to secure access to the account, which after going through extensive procedures was finally granted to them in 2018.
Here they discovered that the inboxes of these accounts had been completely deleted during the first half of 2007, which includes the time when Madeleine ‘Maddie’ McCann disappeared.
But when they checked the accounts’ outboxes, they discovered that Brueckner had sent a multitude of files containing obscene photographs, including photographs of himself with an erect penis.
In addition, it also included several versions of two stories, the ‘Mother/Daughter’ story and the ‘Zofen story’.
The first is about a mother and daughter who are captured, transported in a van to a farm, tortured, and brutally raped.
The second is about children who decide to take revenge on a pedophile who has abused them.
The prosecution claims that they all found this story on a USB stick that was found during a police search in 2016 at the dilapidated Brueckner box factory in Neuwegesleben.
Convicted rapist Brueckner (pictured), 47, is accused of three rapes and two sexual assaults that allegedly took place on Portugal’s Algarve coast in the period between 2000 and 2017.
A view of the apartment block where Madeleine McCann disappeared from in 2007, in Praia da Luz, on Portugal’s Algarve coast.
But the defense has consistently tried to prevent this story from being heard in court, arguing that the police search was unauthorized and therefore the evidence obtained there is inadmissible.
On Tuesday, the court heard police had informed colleagues about a dead dog at the Breuckner premises, prompting a police search.
Here, under intense interrogation by judge Ute Insa Engemann, police officer Katharina Schmidt, 47, admitted to having been on Brueckner’s premises without any permission.
And he even admitted that he knew that he was not allowed to be there, nor take photographs, nor send them to the police to start an investigation.
Taking all this into account, it seemed that the prosecution had no chance of revealing details of this story in court.
But instead, by focusing on Brueckner’s emails, the prosecution yesterday indirectly got the harrowing summary of these stories mentioned in court.
However, regarding the third email, Stampa said he was not authorized to discuss it because it concerned the investigation into Madeleine McCann’s murder.
Speaking outside the courtroom this morning, one of Brueckner’s defense team members, Phillip Marquort, said: “You have to remember that the file with this story was an RTF file, and these files do not identify the author.”
“So, regardless of what was written about what happened yesterday in court, these facts remain, and even Mr. Stampa admitted in court yesterday that they have no way of knowing whether my client wrote the story or not because the RTF files do not record the author.
The trial continues.
