BRAUNSCHWEIG, Germany (AP) — A 47-year-old German man, identified by local media as Christian Brueckner, was acquitted on Tuesday by a German court of charges related to sexual offenses that were not connected to the 2007 disappearance of British toddler Madeleine McCann.
Brueckner faced allegations of two counts of rape and two counts of sexual abuse for incidents said to have occurred in Portugal from 2000 to 2017. His defense lawyers argued that there was insufficient evidence and questioned the credibility of the witnesses against him, suggesting that he might not have been tried if he weren’t also a suspect in the McCann case.
Despite his acquittal, Brueckner will remain in prison for another year as he is currently serving a seven-year sentence for the rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Portugal in 2005. This sentence was handed down by the Braunschweig court in 2019, and he is incarcerated due to his last registered residence being in this city in Lower Saxony.
During the trial, presiding judge Uta Engemann stated, “The evidence we had was not enough to convict the defendant,” adding that the court had to deal with unreliable witnesses, some of whom may have intentionally misled the proceedings. Engemann also highlighted that media portrayals of Brueckner had significantly influenced witness testimonies, describing him as having been “stylized as a sex monster and child murderer.”
Prosecutors had called for a significant 15-year prison sentence, with the suggestion of keeping Brueckner in preventive detention after serving his time. However, following the acquittal, prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters announced plans to appeal the decision, asserting, “We believe that the decision is wrong, so we will appeal to the German supreme court so that the supreme court can check the verdict for mistakes.”
Brueckner remains under investigation concerning the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, although he has not been formally charged in that case. He lived in Portugal for many years, including in the resort town of Praia da Luz around the time of the child’s disappearance in 2007, but has consistently denied any involvement.
After the ruling, Brueckner’s lawyer, Friedrich Fülscher, expressed that the outcome was foreseeable from the defense’s perspective, remarking that the facts and legal circumstances pointed to an acquittal.
