Christian Brückner, the still uncharged suspect for the alleged abduction and equally alleged murder of Madeleine McCann, has finally broken his year-long silence.
Making the point that “charging an accused is one thing” but starting a “public campaign for prejudice before a court case is opened” is quite another, Brückner says Brunswick public prosecutors Hans Christian Wolters and Ute Lindemann’s actions have shown “they are not suitable” for their positions. They “bring shame on the judiciary” and should resign, he has written in a letter written from Oldenburg jail where he is serving a sentence for the rape of an elderly American woman in Praia da Luz two years before Madeleine’s disappearance.
Brückner’s legal representative Friedrich Sebastian Fülscher has stressed in the past that there is no doubt his client is “no angel”, but to have branded him the man responsible for Madeleine McCann’s disappearance – particularly when there appears to be no concrete evidence – is a step way too far (click here).
In the Portuguese press – ahead of revelations on Brückner’s statement – writer and former PJ inspector Francisco Moita Flores recalls it is a year since Wolters told the world that Madeleine was dead and “the case would be resolved very soon”.
More recently, Wolters has said leads are coming in ‘every day’ while there has been the rehashed story of a German psychic who has furnished German police with ‘the exact coordinates’ of where Madeleine’s body lies buried (click here).
Michael Schneider has been ‘reintroduced’ to the media as a clairvoyant who has successfully located the remains of several missing people. Yet the coordinates he is referring to do not correspond in any way to the ‘area of forest’ in which he believes Madeleine’s body lies buried.
In short, the case has descended to the “dominion of the absurd”, says Moita Flores. The latest police investigations “smell bad”.
For the former PJ investigator – as with the initial PJ coordinator who handled the case and was then publicly pilloried – the key to the mystery is the one route no police force appears willing (or able) to touch: reconstruction of the movements of those involved with little Madeleine on that fateful group holiday all those years ago.
It is “the only diligence that can bring light to this case”, stresses Moita Flores, as it will “confront the group of friends” with the “falsities some of them declared” back in 2007.
“It is more than simple”, he concludes. “So stupidly simple that inquisitors don’t acknowledge it. They are mistaken.”
In the UK press today, a source described as ‘close to Brückner’, explains the convicted sex abuser “basically has had enough of how he is being treated by the German judiciary. It is not fair the way he is being treated. What happened to innocent until proven guilty, which is a fundamental principle?”
Brückner’s own statement adds that “freedom of expression is not a basic right so that everyone can say and write what they want. Freedom of expression does not protect the majority. It protects the minority. It does not protect the most logical, most convincing or most popular views – but rather the outsider position”.
