New link to Madeleine McCann suspect revealed for the first time
Detectives have uncovered an email account belonging to convicted paedophile Christian Brueckner that ties him to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, a court has heard.
Detective Titus Stampa told a court that the German FBI had identified two email accounts linked to the man, but was unable to discuss one of them because it was “related to the killing” of the child.
The second email account was used for trading child pornography images with people online.
However, the account had all of the messages deleted from the first half of 2007: the time Maddie vanished.
Detective Stampa refused to confirm if the “murder” account contained any “photos”, but he said investigators were also in possession of a hard drive related to the “murder” which he was not allowed to discuss.
The detective told the court, “An external hard drive is also belonging to the killing case – and I am not allowed to talk about it.”
Asked about the account used for swapping child sex abuse images, Detective Stampa said, “I can remember that things were ‘massively’ deleted in the inbox.
“There was nothing in there from January 2007.”
The revelation offered the first glimpse into the physical proof that has led German investigators to believe Brueckner kidnapped and killed Maddie.
Brueckner has long been the main suspect in the case of Maddie’s disappearance, after a key witness came forward in 2017 to report the man, who claimed that while discussing the McCann case, Brueckner said, “She didn’t scream.”
Madeleine was last seen when she was just three years old in 2007 in Praia da Luz on Portugal’s Algarve coast, when she was on holiday with her family.
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