Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brueckner has confessed to a former cellmate that he kidnapped a girl from a Portuguese apartment during a robbery, a German court heard today.
The 47-year-old paedophile is said to have asked inmate Laurentiu Codin if he was also behind bars for crimes against minors while they were sharing a cell in 2020.
Codin claimed the convicted rapist had begged her to burn down his lair when he was released from prison and asked if “a child’s DNA can be extracted from underground bones.”
This comes after German investigators sensationally named Brueckner as the prime suspect in the abduction of three-year-old British girl Maddie from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in May 2007.
Speaking today at the Braunschweig Regional Court, where Brueckner is on trial for unrelated sexual offences, Codin told a story that bore striking similarities to the night Maddie disappeared.
Christian Brueckner (center) is led into the courtroom for a session of his trial at the court in Braunschweig, northern Germany, September 25, 2024.
Madeleine McCann (pictured) disappeared on 3 May 2007 at the age of three. She has never been found. German criminal Christian Brueckner has been named by German prosecutors as the prime suspect in her disappearance.
“He told me that he had robbed someone in Portugal. He was in an area where there are hotels and rich people live,” Codin said.
“He said there was a place with an open window, he told me that. He was looking for money.
“He said he didn’t find any money, but he found a child and took him. He said two hours later, there were police and dogs everywhere, so he left, out of the area.
‘I’m just saying what he told me. He told me that he had a person with him who he had had an argument with, supposedly it was his wife.
‘He said he took the boy to Portugal in his car, and the moment the police and dogs were at the house, he drove off and disappeared.
‘He asked me if a child’s DNA could be found as evidence and I said yes.’
In more disturbing testimony, Codin, 50, said Brueckner had told him how he had used a van to have sex with young girls near Hanover.
‘There was talk of a girl, I don’t know if what he said was true or not. He said he had a bus and that he had taken her on it. He said he kept some of them, but not others, but he never said he had killed them.
‘We talked about girls, not boys. Not all at once, always one by one. He told me about two. He said he had kidnapped a woman, that he had had sex with her, but that he hadn’t killed her.’
Pictured: The holiday resort where the McCanns were staying in Portugal’s Algarve region in May 2007, when their three-year-old daughter disappeared without a trace.
Asked by the judge how old his victim was, Codin said: “I don’t want to be wrong, but she was very young, tiny. I mean young.”
“Every time we were together he would talk about it because he was convinced that I was a pedophile.”
Brueckner is serving a seven-year prison sentence for the 2005 rape of American pensioner Diana Menkes, 72, in the Algarve.
He is on trial at the Braunschweig district court for unrelated sexual offences allegedly committed in the Algarve between 2000 and 2017.
A house near the resort of Praia da Luz and Lagos in the Algarve, Portugal, which was used by Christian Brueckner, a German man suspected of the disappearance of British girl Madeleine McCann
The crimes for which Brueckner is on trial include the alleged rape of Irish tourism representative Hazel Behan, now 40, at his Praia da Rocha apartment in 2004.
He has also been charged with the alleged rape of a teenager at his home in the same city and raping an elderly woman at his holiday apartment.
Brueckner is also accused of exposing himself to a German girl on a beach in Salema in April 2007 and to an 11-year-old girl in 2017.
His current sentence ends early next year and if he is not found guilty at the ongoing trial, he could be released from prison. The trial is scheduled to conclude in December.
