LONDON — The main suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, who was last seen while on a holiday in Portugal with her parents in 2007, has refused to be interviewed by British police before his imminent release from a German prison.
The suspect, Christian Brückner, 49, is serving time in Germany for the rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Portugal in 2005 and is set to be released Wednesday, according to his lawyer.
The rape took place in Praia da Luz, the same coastal holiday resort in southern Portugal where Madeleine disappeared 18 months later.
London’s Metropolitan Police said that Brückner, who has denied involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance, remained the “primary suspect” in the German federal investigation into the case as well as a suspect in their own investigation.
Mark Cranwell, the senior investigating officer, said in a statement Monday that British authorities had requested an interview with Brückner through an “international letter of request.”
Cranwell said the request was “subsequently refused by the suspect.” He added, “In the absence of an interview, we will nevertheless continue to pursue any viable lines of enquiry.”
German police have been investigating Brückner since 2017. But while they said they had circumstantial evidence pointing at his involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance, including several witnesses who say he confessed, and the fact that his mobile phone was on and located to the area where Madeleine disappeared, investigators do not have legal grounds to hold him once he has served his current sentence.
His release is set to take place months earlier than originally expected. Because he owed the state 1,447 euros (about $1,700) in fines for an unrelated offense, Brückner was supposed to spend 111 additional days after he finished his 7 1/2-year sentence.
However, a former police officer, identified only as Rebecca K. in line with German rules, paid his fine, effectively allowing him to leave the prison this week instead of in January. She has told news outlets that she misunderstood what the fine was for and made a mistake.
Several German media outlets have reported on the payment. The district attorney’s office in Braunschweig, a city in central Germany, has confirmed that the money was paid, but not by whom.
Madeleine was on holiday with her parents in Praia da Luz when she disappeared May 3, 2007.
Then 3 years old, she disappeared from the family’s ground-floor apartment at the Ocean Club complex while her parents were at a nearby restaurant. She had been staying in a room with her younger twin siblings at the time.
New searches were carried out in Portugal in June as part of the investigation into Brückner, following a legal order issued by German authorities.
In 2020, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office named Brückner as a suspect in Madeleine’s disappearance, revealing that he had a history of child sex offenses and other crimes, including drug trafficking and burgling holiday apartments in Portugal.
They said he had lived in the Algarve region in Portugal, which is popular with tourists, between 1995 and 2007, apart from brief spells in Germany.
In October last year, Brückner was cleared by a German court of unrelated sexual offenses that were alleged to have taken place in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.
Brückner was among 600 people considered potentially significant in the Metropolitan Police’s original investigation, but British police said he was not considered a suspect until new information was received in response to an appeal made on the 10th anniversary of her disappearance in 2017.
German authorities are treating the case as a murder investigation, after announcing in June 2020 that officers believed Madeleine to be dead, but British police are still treating it as a missing-person investigation.