An undated handout photograph released by the Metropolitan Police in London of Madeleine McCann who went missing in 2007. (File photo) Photo: AFP / Metropolitan Police handout
The German suspect in the Madeleine McCann disappearance case has been released from prison.
Christian Brueckner is the main suspect in the 2007 disappearance of the British toddler.
He had been serving a seven-year sentence in Germany for an unrelated sex crime - the rape of a 72-year-old woman in Portugal's Algarve region, where Madeleine went missing.
Prosecutors first named Brueckner as a suspect in 2020, while he was already behind bars for the rape of the woman.
Madeleine went missing on May 3, 2007, while on holiday with her family in the Algarve town of Praia da Luz, sparking a frenzied search and gaining the attention of the world's media.
Brueckner lived in Portugal's Algarve region at the time the three-year-old vanished. She has never been found.
A police mug shot of Christian Brueckner. (File photo) Photo: Getty Images / Italian police
Earlier this week, police in the United Kingdom said Brueckner refused to be interviewed.
"We have requested an interview with this German suspect, but … it was subsequently refused by the suspect," senior investigating officer from Britain's Metropolitan Police, DCI Mark Cranwell, said in a statement on Monday.
Brueckner's lawyer, Friedrich Fülscher, has said charges would have been filed against his client long ago if there had been sufficient evidence.
The state court in Hildesheim, Germany, has said it cannot legally disclose whether he will have to fulfil any conditions after his release.
But Fülscher confirmed to regional public broadcaster NDR that his client will be required to wear an electronic foot tag, report regularly to probation services and give up his passport.
Brueckner still faces an October 27 court date in Oldenburg in north-western Germany in a case in which he is accused of insulting a prison employee.
A district court in the city sentenced him to six weeks in prison for that, but the defence has appealed.
- ABC
