The British police have received around 400 new reports in the Maddie case. A police spokesman said on Sunday in London that they had arrived by phone or email. A 43-year-old German is said to have kidnapped little Madeleine McCann from a holiday resort in Portugal on 3 May 2007.
Investigators in Germany are convinced that the child is dead. The British police, on the other hand, continue to assume that there is a missing person after 13 years. “There is no definitive evidence that Madeleine is still alive or dead,” said Scotland Yard spokesman.
The suspect is in a prison in Kiel. He has been convicted of multiple sex offenses, including on children. The 43-year-old had lived in the Algarve in southern Portugal for years, also near the crime scene in the resort of Praia da Luz. Among other things, he had kept himself afloat with odd jobs.
“This is the man I saw”
A British witness claims to have recognized the suspect after a Sun report on Saturday. At that time he was said to have behaved strangely near the McCann family’s apartment. The newspaper calls the woman a “credible witness” who is said to have described the man a few hours after the little girl disappeared in the holiday resort in Portugal.
Now, when she was shown a picture of the suspect, the witness said, according to Sun, “This is the man I saw.” Scotland Yard did not want to comment on the report at the weekend’s request from the German Press Agency.
The sensational call for witnesses to the missing Maddie on Wednesday evening in the ZDF program “Aktenzeichen XY … unresolved” fueled the hope that the case could still be solved. The then three-year-old British girl Madeleine McCann disappeared on May 3, 2007 from an apartment complex in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz. The investigators suspect that the German kidnapped and killed the girl. There are many clues, but the chain of evidence is not closed. “It is not enough for an arrest warrant or an indictment,” said Hans Christian Wolters from the Braunschweig public prosecutor’s office on Friday.
Multiple convicted man
The German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and the public prosecutor’s office in Braunschweig announced on Wednesday that the 43-year-old was suspected of murder. He has been convicted of sex offenses several times and is currently serving a prison sentence in Kiel, which the Niebüll District Court imposed on him in 2011. It was about the trade in narcotics.
In parallel, he is ordered to be held in custody on charges of rape. Most recently, the Braunschweig Regional Court sentenced him on December 16, 2019 to seven years in prison for serious rape, including previous sentences. In 2005, around a year and a half before Maddie’s disappearance, he raped a 72-year-old American in Praia da Luz. The judgment is not yet final, the revision is with the Federal Court of Justice.
When Maddie disappeared from Praia da Luz in the Algarve, the man was 30 years old. He regularly stayed in the region between 1995 and 2007, a few years in a house between Lagos and Praia da Luz. He was punished several times in both Germany and Portugal.
The investigators do not rule out further previously unknown crimes committed by the man. The Stendal prosecutor’s office is examining possible parallels between the Maddie case and other cases. (apa)
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