A chief prosecutor made a stirring final plea in a German court today, slamming the prime suspect in the case of Madeleine McCann as a ‘sadistic psychopath’ and demanding he receive 15 years for horrific sex offences.
Convicted paedophile and rapist Christian Brueckner, 47, is the man who German investigators believe abducted three-year-old Madeleine from her parents’ holiday apartment in the Algarve, Portugal in 2007.
Brueckner is currently on trial in Braunschweig, northern Germany, for a string of non-related sex offences in Portugal, including three cases of rape, and two cases of allegedly pleasuring himself in front of children.
Chief public prosecutor Ute Lindemann, who has headed the investigation, has already officially tried to have the current judge, Ute Insa Engemann, removed from the case, claiming that she is biased in favour of the defence.
Brueckner (left) is seen next to his lawyer Friedrich Fuelscher as he waits in the courtroom for a session of his trial in Braunschweig, Germany, on Wednesday
He is accused of three counts of rape and two counts of child sex abuse allegedly committed in Portugal between 2000 and 2017
Convicted paedophile and rapist Brueckner, 47, is the man who German investigators believe abducted Madeleine McCann in 2007
But today chief prosecutor Lindemann had to make a lengthy plea to the very same judge, arguing she should convict Brueckner of these grotesque sex offences in Portugal.
‘The defence lawyer said in an interview it is all about winning for him. But the prosecution is not about winning. My job is to make sure to find out what happens and then to hold those involved to account.’
In court prosecutor Lindemann did not hold back when it came to criticism of the presiding judge, Ute Insa Engemann saying: ‘It is my conviction that the chamber will not seriously interest itself in my opinion because it has already expressed that it is set on an acquittal for the accused.’
And she said she had been so shocked by the judge’s interrogation of one police witness ‘you sometimes had the impression that the police officer was sitting on the bench for the accused’.
In one case, that of prosecution witness, Manfred Seifert, Lindemann even said the judge had put him under so much pressure and displayed such ‘aggression’ that by the end of his five hours he no longer knew what he was saying and could not properly string together a sentence.
The most chilling moment during the hearing was when Lindemann revealed explicit and gruesome quotes from twisted rape fantasies Brueckner is alleged to have written, some of which had been found in his email inbox.
The details are so graphic that in the last hearing, the forensic psychiatrist Dr Christian Riedeman said they could not even be read out in court, but today Lindemann referred to two of them in detail.
One story involved the kidnapping of a 25 year old mother and her young daughter who were driven in a van to an abandoned farm, where they were placed in two rooms.
The charges are unrelated to the Madeleine McCann case, in which Brueckner was sensationally revealed as a suspect in 2020
Brueckner is already behind bars in Germany for raping a 72-year-old American tourist in 2005 in Praia da Luz, the same Portuguese seaside resort where Madeleine McCann went missing two years later
Both of the victims were beaten. In one room, the mother was tied by her legs to steel bars and had to watch on camera while her daughter was raped, orally, vaginally and anally, from the other room by a man in black, wearing a mask with slits for the eyes and mouth.
Throughout the story Lindemann would interject, arguing there is a direct link between the details of this sadistic rape fantasy and the brutal rape of Irish national Hazel Behan in Portugal.
Behan was also raped by a man wearing a black mask, with slits for the eyes and nose. She was also tied up by the legs to the metal legs of the breakfast bar, before being anally raped both there and in her bedroom and the living room.
Lindemann said this was all about ‘core fantasies, the rituals of tormenting and humiliating and getting a kick out of the suffering of the victims’.
Lindemann made specific reference to how in one of his alleged rape fantasy stories, Brueckner had written that he had said to his child rape victim ‘Are you afraid? Good. Because I am going to really hurt you and make you scream really loud’ before explicitly detailing exactly how he was going to rape them.
This was then linked to how Behan, who, after being tied up to the breakfast bar, was then asked by her rapist ‘You’re afraid aren’t you?’
When Behan then said no, she was brutally raped and then asked, ‘Now are you afraid?’
‘Here it is about the excitement through fear, and humiliating the female victims,’ Lindemann said.
Christian B, when he was arrested for drug trafficking in Italy in 2018
Madeleine McCann (pictured) went missing on May 3, 2007 at the age of just three. She has never been found. German criminal Christian Brueckner has been named by German prosecutors as their chief suspect in her disappearance
Pictured: The holiday complex where the McCanns were staying in Portugal’s Algarve region in May 2007, when their three-year-old daughter vanished without a trace
Another story the prosecution says was found to be linked to Brueckner, written for children aged six and upwards, is a disturbing tale ‘…in which he comes across as an exceptionally brutal rapist of children.’
Here he described where he rapes girls vaginally, anally, orally, uses whips and ties them up.
Here Lindemann referred to how in all the rapes he was being charged with, Brueckner is supposed to have raped the woman in a variety of ways, also tying them up to humiliate and scare then, and using whips to hurt them.
At the last court hearing last Friday, the 32nd hearing in this case, the prosecution case was arguably strengthened by the verdict of the in-court forensic psychiatrist Dr Christian Riedemann, who gave a damning assessment of the accused.
In July the prosecution had suffered a devastating blow when the current judge ruled that the evidence against Brueckner in relation to these sex charges was ‘insufficient’, which was widely interpreted as a strong indication that he could be acquitted.
And were Brueckner acquitted, German authorities would have to be able to prove that he poses a danger to society for them to be able to impose ‘preventive detention’ and keep him behind bars.
Supporting the prosecution in court last Friday, forensic psychiatrist Dr Christian Riedemann, 54, who is also the chief physician and director of the Bad Rehburg correctional facility, made it clear that he considered the accused to be extremely dangerous.
‘He belongs in the absolute top league of dangerousness,’ he said.
He determined that Brueckner had a ‘sexual preference disorder’ which also had ‘sadistic and paedophilic elements’.
Specifically he said that Brueckner seemed to gain a sense of satisfaction from tormenting, subjugating and humiliating others.
And he added that there was ‘a 30 to 50 percent probability’ that Brueckner could commit further crimes within two years if he were free.
Dr Riedemann had sought to interview Brueckner, but the accused had refused.
‘I would like to ask him a lot of questions. He has refused to be assessed. I therefore have to speculate about a lot of things’ said Riedemann.
Dr Riedemann had to use prison files as a basis for his assessment.
Here Brueckner was described as displaying a range of bad behaviour towards the prison guards and constantly trying to cause trouble.
And he was also slammed as ‘arrogant’, ‘manipulative’, ‘passive aggressive’, ‘cynical’ and ‘inaccessible’.
Riedemann also described how he had used a model in which the defendant was compared to 1,078 other criminals, and said here ’98 to 99 percent of the prognosis was more favourable’.
He added that Brueckner was unable to accept any responsibility for his criminal acts, and had an ‘inflated’ self of his own importance.
Born in 1976 in the southern German town of Wurzburg, Christian Brueckner was allegedly mistreated by his foster parents, who are supposed to have beaten him and even locked him for days without water in a darkened cellar.
He has a long criminal history, and has already been convicted over a dozen times.
His crimes have included theft, driving offences, forging documents and a range of sex offences against both children and adults.
He first abused a child in 1993, then in 1994, aged just 17, he was sentenced to two years in youth custody for both this crime and another act of abuse.
But instead of serving the sentence, Brueckner fled to Portugal when he continued a life of crime.
He was arrested in Portugal in 1999 and extradited to Germany.
He is currently serving the end of his sentence for the rape of US national Diana Menkes in Portugal in 2005, and has spent these seven years in solitary confinement.
It is possible a verdict will be given next week as the defense is set to give its final plea Monday.