Topline
Prosecutors in Portugal said Thursday they have identified an official suspect in the 2007 disappearance of 3-year-old Madeleine McCann from a Portuguese resort, Reuters reported, with just weeks left before the case’s statute of limitations expires. [CORRECTION: A previous version of this story reported that prosecutors charged a suspect, citing Agence France-Presse, but AFP later retracted its report]
Three-year-old Madeleine McCann disappeared from a Portuguese resort in 2007.
Key Facts
Portuguese prosecutors did not name the suspect, but they said he was previously identified by police in Germany, according to the Guardian and Reuters—a German man in his mid-40s named Christian Brueckner was identified as a suspect by German prosecutors in 2020.
Brueckner reportedly worked at the resort from which McCann disappeared, and was placed in the vicinity of the resort around the time of the disappearance.
Brueckner is currently imprisoned in Germany for sexual offenses and drug trafficking, the Guardian reported.
Key Background
On May 3, 2007, McCann vanished from an unlocked apartment near the Ocean Club, a resort in the seaside community of Praia da Luz, Portugal, while her parents—who were visiting from the U.K.—were at a nearby restaurant. Shortly after the disappearance, McCann’s parents were named as suspects by Portuguese police, who theorized the toddler had accidentally been killed and the death was covered up. This theory was bolstered when traces of McCann’s DNA were found in a car her parents had rented after her disappearance. However, McCann’s parents were never charged in connection to the case. McCann’s parents later won the equivalent of roughly $717,000 in libel damages from Express Newspapers, a British tabloid newspaper group that had run stories baselessly accusing the couple of having killed their daughter. Despite a widely publicized campaign to find McCann, which drew support from public figures from J.K. Rowling to Pope Benedict XVI, little concrete evidence has publicly emerged in the intervening 15 years.
Tangent
Prosecutors’ decision to identify an official suspect may be connected to Portugal’s 15-year time limit on prosecuting crimes with a potential maximum sentence of 10 years or more, Reuters reported. In the McCann case, that time limit is set to expire early next month.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharysmith/2022/04/21/prosecutors-reportedly-identify-suspect-in-madeleine-mccanns-disappearance/