Madeleine McCann suspect 'confessed to abducting girl from Portuguese apartment,' court hears
25 September 2024, 14:11 | Updated: 25 September 2024, 14:46
A suspect in the Madeleine McCann investigation confessed to abducting a young girl from her Algarve holiday apartment, a former cellmate said.
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Convicted paedophile Christian Brueckner is suspected of snatching and killing the three-year-old British youngster in Praia da Luz in May 2007.
Today Brueckner’s former cellmate Laurentiu Codin told a court that the German confessed to abducting a child in Portugal.
Codin, 50, said the 47-year-old made the confession while they were both on remand in the same prison.
He told the hearing: “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. 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 how old his victim was, Codin said: “I don’t want to get it wrong, but it was very young, tiny. I mean young.
"Each time when we were together he spoke about it because he was convinced that I was a paedophile."
Brueckner is currently serving a seven-year prison term for raping an American pensioner in Praia da Luz.
He is standing trial in Germany on unconnected sex crimes allegedly carried out in the Algarve between 2000 and 2017.
They include the alleged rape of an Irish tour rep who was attacked in her apartment Praia da Rocha in 2004.
Brueckner is also accused of raping a teenage girl in his Praia da Luz home and raping an elderly woman in her holiday apartment.
He also faces a child sex charge for allegedly exposing himself to a German girl on a beach in Salema in April 2007. His final charge relates to an alleged indecent exposure in front of an 11-year-old in 2017.
He denies the latest charges, as well as having any involvement in the McCann case.
The trial is due to finish in December.
