Jon Clarke (Publisher & Editor)
A FORMER friend of Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brueckner has revealed how he abused her child while out walking his dogs.
Anja K told a court in Germany that the sex offender took pornographic photos of his daughter in a park.
The German mother – who had become friends with the German paedophile via an online dating forum called Chat2000 – said he had abused the girl, aged just four, on various occasions.
On day nine of the sex crimes trial of Brueckner in Braunschweig, the single parent from Hanover said she had left her child alone with him, while she tended his kiosk in the city.
READ MORE: EXCLUSIVE: Child victim of sex assault in Portugal recognises Brueckner in the courtroom
Then 32, she had met him in the Spring of 2013 a year after he returned from Portugal and two short spells in prison.
She told the court how the 47-year-old – who is facing three rape charges and two assault charges against children, all in Portugal from 2000 to 2017 – had clearly only intended to groom her daughter.
“I wanted to get to know someone new,” she explained. “Christian was also single at the time. I wanted to get out of my environment, experience something different.
“At the beginning I thought he was Interested in me, but clearly I had written that I had a child.
“Initially, I never thought he was interested in my daughter.”
After a short while chatting online she spent the next six months travelling from her home in nearby Laatzen to visit Brueckner in Braunschweig.
She visited about once a month sometimes for several hours, sometimes for a whole day.
From time to time she also took her daughter – who loved his two dogs – even though Brueckner was permanently ‘drunk’ and he and his friends took drugs in the adjacent apartment of the kiosk, where he lived.
“He continually drank beer and in the morning he still smelled of it from the evening before,” she continued.
“The place always stank of smoke, it was messy, not clean, and there was firewood stacked in the bedroom.”
She got to know him well and he started to trust her and open up about his life back in Portugal, where he lived from the mid 1990s until 2011, on and off.
In particular, she said he bragged about his burglaries in his Portugal years and how he broke into homes wearing a stocking mask and sometimes with swimming goggles.
He also told her how he frequently burgled homes naked and often even stepped around people sleeping to take his swag.
“I thought it was a joke,” the petite brunette mum told the court, admitting she didn’t really believe it, largely as he normally told the stories when he was drunk.
But one story really did stick in her memory, one that certainly bears credence and ties in with other evidence police and investigators have compiled.
This was a boast he made of one extremely lucrative burglary when he stole around ‘€100,000’, some of which (understood to be €38,000) he later used to buy a derelict box factory in Neuwegersleben, in Saxony.
Anja explained how Brueckner told her he had undertaken the robbery in a villa with the help of a woman he had got to know well on the Algarve.
Prison psychologist Dr. Christian Riedemann, who has been attending the trial as an expert witness, asked what Brueckner thought of her daughter.
“Christian thought she was cute and said she could become a model. I dismissed it. I dismissed everything he said,” she explained.
This was why she trusted him to take her out for walks to the park with his dogs, on the understanding she was ‘relieving’ him from the long hours he worked at the kiosk.
It was then that he was able to abuse her trust and take pornographic pictures of the girl, which police later seized.
In a series of photos, over which he was prosecuted in 2017, he made her spread her legs while on a slide and on the grass of a local park.
According to the ruling of the District Court of Braunschweig, he pushed her panties aside and touched her private parts.
And in another photo, you can clearly see his erect penis with her behind.
These recordings, as well as hundreds of other child abuse photos and videos, were discovered in the summer of 2014 during a raid on his kiosk.
They were found on the memory card of his digital camera, kept behind the counter on a shelf by bars of chocolate.
By this point the net was tightening on Brueckner, who a year earlier had been handed his first summons at the kiosk over his connection to the Maddie case.
Police had suspected his involvement in her disappearance in May, 2007, when he was living near Praia da Luz and his name had come forward.
Unbelievably German police had given him three days to prepare himself for the interview, an error they have since admitted to.
But when the Hanover Public Prosecutor’s Office opened a case against him for the possession of child pornography – and the assault against Anja’s daughter – in the Spring 2016, he knew he had to flee Germany fast.
He had already been sentenced to 21 months in prison for drug dealing at Niebull Court in October 2011, for which he had received a suspended sentence on the basis he didn’t reoffend. This would now need to be served.
It was at this point he quickly canceled his contracts with both the kiosk and a nearby allotment and handed his white Mercedes Sprinter van he was buying on hire purchase to the local dealership.
A friend told the Olive Press he ‘knew he had to move fast as the net was tightening’.
He first drove a vanload of things to his box factory and then loaded up his blue Renault Twingo and off he went.
A European arrest warrant was issued for him, when police failed to find him in Germany to face the charges at Braunschweig court.
Just a year after returning to Portugal he was picked up again when in June 2017, he is said to have masturbated in front of children at an annual Snail festival, in Sao bartolomeu de Messines.
The arrest warrant was served and he was extradited back to Germany to face court in the Autumn that year.
Despite a judicial error when he was mistakenly allowed out for two weeks he was finally handed a 15 month sentence for the abuse of Anja K’s daughter and the possession of other child pornography.
As usual Christian Brueckner sat emotionless throughout the hour of testimony.
He would however have been happy with the testimony of two other witnesses called, who claimed to know nothing about the case.
Both Mario S (aka tattoo artist, Cheyanne) and his girlfriend Ukrike S insisted they had never met either Brueckner or other witnesses Helge Busching or Manfred Seyferth.
In incredibly short testimony, the pair who ran a hotel for bikers called Rebel Farm inland from the Algarve at Santa Clara, refused to open up.
Busching had claimed they knew about two rape videos Christian Brueckner is said to have made and they had ‘ended up’ at Rebel Farm after they stole them from his home near Praia da Luz.
But neither of the Germans – who moved to Bremen two years ago – would confirm any of it.
