Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brueckner allegedly made a deeply unsettling confession regarding a young girl staying in a holiday apartment in Portugal, a former cellmate said.
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The convicted sex offender is suspected of snatching and killing then three-year-old Madeleine in Praia da Luz in May 2007.
Brueckner’s former cellmate Laurentiu Codin told a court yesterday that the German confessed to abducting a child in Portugal.
“He told me that in Portugal, he had stolen there,” he said per The Mirror. “He was in a region where there are hotels and rich people live. He said there was somewhere with an open window, he told me this. He was looking for money.
“He said he didn’t find any money but found a kid and took the child. He said that two hours later, there were police and dogs all over the place, so he then went away, out of the area.
“I am just saying what he told me. He told me that a person was with him, who he had had an argument with, allegedly it was his woman. He said he took the child in Portugal in his car, and in the time when the police and dogs were at the house, he drove away and he was gone.
“He asked me if the DNA from a child can be taken from bones under the ground.”
As well as the latest shocking claim, Codin also alleged Brueckner had confessed to "abducting and r*ping young girls."
Brueckner, 47, allegedly confessed in 2020 that he had previously snatched young girls and r*ped them on a bus he owned.
Laurentiu Codin, 50, claimed in court that the German "confided" in him while they were both on remand in the same prison.
He said: “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 by the judge 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 p**ophile.” Brueckner is currently serving a seven-year prison term for r*ping 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 r*pe of Irish tour rep Hazel Behan, who was attacked in her apartment Praia da Rocha in 2004.
Brueckner is also accused of r*ping a teenage girl in his Praia da Luz home and r*ping 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.
Brueckner could walk free if he is cleared in the latest trial. If he is found not guilty, he could be freed from prison in the early next year.
The trial is due to end in December.
