Jon Clarke (Publisher & Editor)
THE Chief prosecutor against Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brueckner has told the Olive Press he has ‘a month’ to prepare an appeal against a recent ruling.
It comes after Hans Christian Wolters confirmed to this paper that he had received the written judgement that found the German paedophile innocent of five sex crimes in October.
He said he had received the detailed 263 page report – which the Olive Press has now seen – on Thursday.
“We now have one month to justify the appeal we have filed,” he explained. “The proceedings are therefore expected to arrive at the Federal Court of Justice in Leipzig in March 2025.”
He added: “Since there are currently no current developments in the Maddie case that I can talk about, I don’t see the need for further interviews right now.”
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It comes after he told Sky News ‘on a slow news day’ last week that ‘a charge in the Maddie case is not to be expected at this time.”
Followed up by the media around the world, it was therefore assumed that Brueckner, 48, could be freed ‘within weeks’ and certainly by September.
However, the Olive Press can reveal that police and prosecutors are ‘confident’ that the Federal court will order his re-arrest.
“We hope that the Federal Court will decide before the end of the detention,” continued Wolters.
“Should it follow our legal view we could apply for a new arrest warrant for the accused acts, so that the defendant would remain in custody beyond September.”
He is currently serving the final year of a seven-year sentence for the violent, sadistic rape of American pensioner Diana Menkes, in Praia da Luz, in Portugal, in 2005.
One of his hairs was found in her villa, just 200 metres from where British toddler Maddie, 3, was snatched from her holiday home in 2007.
According to Olive Press sources in Germany, the ruling by Judge Uta Engemann at Braunschweig Court, shows a ‘considerable contradiction’ in the arguments that found him not guilty of the five separate sex crimes.
In particular, because the court judgement gives, for the first time, detailed blow by blow accounts of how paedophile Brueckner was convicted of abusing two young children – six and eight years old – when he was a young teen in Wurzburg.
It also includes a series of depraved emails intercepted by police that Brueckner sent which showed his fantasies over violent rapes and child abuse, including snatching and kidnapping children.
A number of them showed how he actively tried to recruit victims who would allow him to tie them up and attack them sexually.
In a number of them he asked to be tied up, beaten and sexually assaulted.
The five crimes for which he was actually charged were three sadistic rapes and two child sex abuse cases taking place in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.
But, the judge believed that various witnesses were lying about videos Brueckner had allegedly made of violent rapes of a teenage girl and an older woman.
She said she couldn’t discount the fact they were trying to ‘set up’ the accused.
She also didn’t believe a former cellmate Laurentiu Codin, who told the court that Brueckner admitted a hair of his had been found in the house of one rape victim.
Codin told the court he had told him he snatched a girl from a holiday apartment in Portugal and asked him if DNA could be found from bones.
He also confessed to Codin, while in prison, of a series of other attacks of young girls and women, both in Portugal and in Germany.
Regarding his last arrest in Messines, on the Algarve, in 2017, the judge believed he was merely urinating in a children’s play park.
That is despite five Portuguese children telling police – and the court – that he masterbated in front of them firstly between two market stalls and then sitting under a slide where he took his trousers and pants down.
Finally, a leading psychiatrist, who has studied Brueckner for a number of years in the prison system, insisted he was extremely dangerous and likely to commit sex crimes again.
“He is in the top league of dangerousness,” Dr Christian Riedemann told the court.
He based his conclusions on prison files and evidence heard during the ongoing trial.
Brueckner scored nearly 100 percent on a test where just over 60 percent suggests the subject is a psychopath. Another test scored him as 99 percent on a scale of danger.
However, Brueckner’s lawyer Philip Marquort, said: “This confirms the suspicions we have repeatedly expressed, namely that there is no reliable evidence against our client.”
The hope of a retrial meanwhile, was welcomed by Irish victim Hazel Behan, who told the court she was certain she had been raped by Brueckner during a late night ordeal in 2004.
Speaking from Dublin, she told the Olive Press she feels the judge in the case was ‘biased’ and committed ‘a variety of errors’.
In particular she feels Judge Engemann omitted certain important bits of evidence and ‘pushed her own agenda’.
“I really hope that the higher court sees sense and takes a proper hard look at the evidence and realises that we need a better judge to undertake this case,” she said.
Brueckner lived for many years in Spain and Portugal, in particular around Orgiva, in Granada, where he was a known drug dealer.
