The mystery donor who paid the £1,300 court fine that has paved the way a key suspect in the Madeleine McCann’s case to walk free has been identified as a former police officer.
The woman, who has not been named, claims to have formerly been involved in wire-tapping the jail cell of paedophile Christian Brueckner, The Sun reported.
Brueckner is the main suspect in the unsolved disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann, who vanished from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in May 2007.
The 48-year-old is currently serving a seven-year jail sentence in Germany for the 2005 rape of an American woman, then 72, in the same Algarve resort where Maddie went missing.
The woman who paid the fine is said to be a former member of the BKA, the German equivalent of the FBI.
She told German newspaper Der Spiegel that she was the person responsible for settling Brueckner’s oustanding balance with the courts – but claims her decision to do so was based on a ‘misunderstanding’.
Until now the convicted rapist was only able to raise £210 of the total amount owed, meaning he was set to remain in jail until January 2026.
However thanks to the former officer’s intervention Brueckner is now set to be released on September 17 this year – three weeks time.
The former police officer’s actions appear to undermine her former employer, with German police still seeking to find forensic evidence to charge Christian Brueckner with Maddy’s disappearance.
The woman, who claims to work in ‘Operative Technology Audio’, says that she was previously reponsible for bugging the paedophile’s jail cell.
However, she reportedly thought that the outstanding fine was due only to Brueckner insulting a police officer – a charge she said ‘wasn’t justified’.
She claims that by the time she learnt that the financial penalties related to a number of more serious infringemnts, including bodily harm, it was too late.
The woman told Der Spiegel that the payment was a ‘misunderstanding’ and that she had attempted to reverse it, but to no avail.
The reasons for paying the fine appear bizarre, but the former officer alleges that she has ‘never had any personal contact with Christian B’.
The German newspaper was, however, able to confirm that she had transferred the total sum – £1,300 – into an account belonging to the Braunschweig public prosecutor’s office.
The payment covered outstanding fines on Brueckner’s record, including a 2016 charge for drunkenness in traffic and forgery of documents and another from 2017 for assault.
Brueckner, who has been under investigation by German police in connection with Madeleine’s disappearance since 2020, has vehemently denied the allegations.
Last October, he was also cleared of a series of unrelated sex attacks that took place in the Algarve between 2000 and 2017.
Brueckner’s lawyer Philipp Marquort previously told MailOnline that he believed the sexual offender ‘will leave Germany’ when released, but that he would likely remain in jail until early 2026.
He added: ‘I haven’t had a chance to speak with him yet about the searches and I am not going to comment on what has been happening in Portugal.
‘What I will say is that I don’t think he will be coming out in September as he doesn’t have any money to pay the fines because it went on his legal fees, so I can’t see him leaving prison until early next year.
‘He will probably see the news on the TV in his cell and he will talk about it when he calls me next time but I still do think when he is freed he will leave Germany.’
News about his court fees being paid comes just weeks after two buried guns were discovered during an intensive three-day search operation near Brueckner’s former ramshackle cottage home close to where Madeleine vanished.
Earlier this month, German authorities launched fresh searches through Atalaia – a stretch of scrubland littered with rubbish and graffiti-covered buildings linked by a network of dusty tracks known in Portuguese as the Fisherman’s Trail.
Connecting Praia da Luz with the nearby town of Lagos, the track is a popular hiking route for tourists, but for four days last week it was cordoned off for members of the BKA – Germany ‘s equivalent of the FBI – to conduct searches.
The search marked the first in Portugal for more than two years, following a near-week-long operation involving Portugese, German and police officers at a remote dam a 40-minute drive from Praia da Luz.
Brueckner has denied any involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance in a series of letters but has refused to engage with police or provide them with an alibi.
He has also admitted to being close to the villa where Madeleine was sleeping on the night of her disapperance.
