A police officer has paid a fine which is said to have brought forward the release date of the main suspect in Madeleine McCann’s disappearance – meaning he could walk free in weeks.
Investigators suspect Christian Brueckner, 48, played a part in young Maddie vanishing from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in May 2007.
The German national is currently serving a seven-year jail sentence in his native country for the 2005 rape of an American woman, then 72, in the same Algarve resort.
Police had initially hoped to keep Brueckner behind bars due to an outstanding €1,446 fine, for charges of assault and forgery of documents, from a previous conviction in 2015.
If he were unable to pay it, he would have been forced to serve another 56 days of ‘alternative imprisonment’, an extension that investigators believed might buy them more time to bring fresh charges in Madeleine’s case.
But now a former German federal police employee has stumped up the cash to pay the remaining fine, potentially bringing Brueckner’s release date forward to as early as September, Der Spiegel reports.
She transferred the amount to the Braunschweig public prosecutor’s account on June 5, German prosecutors confirmed on Monday.
The cop admitted to making the payment but labelled it a ‘misunderstanding’, adding that she had never met Brueckner but had got in touch with his lawyer last year.
She paid the additional fine as she thought it was to do with an insult charge, which she deemed to be unjustified.
The woman claimed she only later discovered the extra amount was associated with more severe offences, adding she unsuccessfully attempted to reverse the transfer.
Brueckner’s lawyer, Dr. Friedrich Fülscher, previously told Bild that they believed upon his release the convicted paedophile plans to live on the island of Sylt in northern Germany, where he previously received a 21 month sentence for drug dealing.
However, prosecutors fear that he will flee Germany, meaning that it will be incredibly challenging to bring him to court should they find enough evidence to charge him in connection with Madeleine’s disappearance.
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.’
It 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.
In a newly unearthed letter seen in June, German paedophile Brueckner boasted that police don’t have evidence to pin allegations against him in relation to the toddler’s case, gloating how the dropping of the probe ‘will hit the world like a bomb’.
In the spine-chilling correspondence from prison in his native Germany, where he is currently behind bars for rape, he wrote: ‘Is there a body? No, no no.’
In a letter seen by The Sun, he claimed the ‘important’ and ‘decisive’ questions about his involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance have been left unanswered.
He questioned if his vehicle was ‘clearly’ spotted on the night of the crime near where toddler vanished, and if his DNA or ‘an injured person’ had been found.
He added: ‘Are there other traces/DNA carriers of the injured party in my possession? Photos?’
Disturbing clues were also discovered at the sex offender’s abandoned lair in Germany as the probe into Madeleine’s disappearance intensified in May, with prosecutors sure the youngster is dead.
A bombshell cache of horrifying documents, pictures, children’s swimming costumes and toys was reportedly uncovered at a former box-making factory he bought in 2008, a year after the British girl was last seen.
Among the disturbing finds was a hard drive of images that police are said to have kept secret – but are reportedly thought to uphold investigators’ long-held belief that Madeleine was killed.
Police reportedly later found an insurance document that is said to corroborate an informant’s account that he allegedly confessed to her murder in Spain in 2008.
The materials found by police, revealed in a Sun investigation broadcast on Channel 4, shed new light on Brueckner’s disturbing obsession with children and his potential involvement in the case.
