A man who is suspected of kidnapping Madeleine McCann allegedly confessed to abducting a young girl from her holiday apartment in Portugal, a former cellmate said.
Convicted paedophile Christian Brueckner is suspected of snatching and killing the three-year-old British girl in Praia da Luz in 2007.
He is on trial in Braunschweig, Germany, charged with five offences, including three counts of rape, said to have taken place in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.
The attacks all took place close to where Madeleine vanished in Praia da Luz in May 2007, it is claimed.
Brueckner’s former cellmate Laurentiu Codin told a court the German national had confessed to him he kidnapped a child in the Algarve.
Codin said: ‘He told me that in Portugal, he had stolen there. He was in a region where there are hotels and rich people live.
‘He said there was somewhere with an open window, he told me this. He was looking for money.
‘He said he didn’t find any money but found a kid and took the child. He said that two hours later, there were police and dogs all over the place, so he then went away, out of the area.’
Codin, 50, said Brueckner, 47, had ‘confided’ in him while they were both on remand in the same prison.
He added: ‘I am just saying what he told me. He told me that a person was with him, who he had had an argument with, allegedly it was his woman.
‘He said he took the child in Portugal in his car, and in the time when the police and dogs were at the house, he drove away and he was gone.
‘He asked me if the DNA from a child can be taken from bones under the ground.’
Brueckner has never been charged in connection with Madeleine’s disappearance and denies being involved.
He was formally identified as an official suspect in the McCann case in April 2022.
German police said in June 2020 that Madeleine was assumed dead.
Codin said Brueckner told him this information because he was convinced that he too was a paedophile.
‘There was talk of a girl, I don’t know if what he said was true or not. He said that he had a bus and that he had taken her with it. He said he kept some of them, but not others, but he never said that he had killed them,’ Codin said.
‘We’re talking about girls, not boys. Not all at once, always one at a time. He told me about two. He said that he had taken someone, had sex with her but he didn’t kill her.’
Asked by the judge how old his victim was, Codin said: ‘I don’t want to get it wrong, but it was very young, tiny. I mean young.’
Brueckner was investigated by German and Portuguese police for three years before he was officially named as a suspect in 2020.
He’s currently on trial for a number of rape and sexual assault charges which all allegedly took place in Portugal.
He denies all charges against him and the trial continues.
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