Police launch fresh search efforts for missing girl linked to prime Madeleine McCann suspect
6 February 2025, 17:59
Police have launched fresh search efforts for a young girl whose disappearance has been linked to the prime suspect in the Madeleine McCann case.
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Inga Gehricke, five, went missing following a family barbecue in Germany back in 2015.
This week, around 50 officers were seen searching a forest near Wilhelmshof in new efforts to find the missing girl, which come nearly a decade after her disappearance.
Christian Brueckner, the number one suspect linked to Madeleine McCann's disappearance, has previously been investigated in connection to Inga’s.
Detectives reportedly searched Brueckner’s home a year after Inga went missing in the German town of Stendal, but no further action was taken.
Referred to in local reports as “the German Maddie”, Inga is one of Germany’s best-known missing persons cases.
Read more: Fears grow for missing mum, 18, and baby daughter as police launch urgent appeal
Authorities have conducted a series of searches over the years, including in 2024.
While there have been thousands of potential leads, police are still waiting for a breakthrough.
Christian Brueckner was sensationally named as the prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine in June 2020 by German police but has since had no charges brought against him.
He is currently in Sehnde Prison, near Hanover, where he is serving a seven-year sentence for the rape of a pensioner in Praia da Luz - the same area of Portugal where Madeleine disappeared in 2007.
"Sometimes he wants to stay here in Germany, sometimes he wants to leave Europe," he told the Mirror. "If I were him I would leave Europe and look for a state which doesn't extradite to Europe or Great Britain, maybe like Suriname."
In September, 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."
