Madeleine McCann suspect charged with rape of Irish woman in Portugal

German prosecutors have filed four sets of charges – for sexual assault of women and sexual abuse of children – against a man under investigation for the disappearance of British girl Madeleine McCann in 2007.

The charges filed against German man Christian Brückner include the rape in Portugal in 2004 of Irish woman Hazel Behan. Then 20, Ms Behan was awoken by a masked, knife-wielding man who subjected her to a violent ordeal over several hours.

Ms Behan has waived her anonymity and spoken a number of times in the media about the ordeal to which she was subjected.

No charges have yet been brought in connection with the McCann case but Braunschweig prosecutors said their investigation continues and appealed for fresh information.

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Brückner (45), who lived in the Algarve between 1995 and 2007, is serving a seven-year term in Germany for the rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Portugal in 2005.

Last year he was named by Portuguese and German prosecutors as an official suspect in the Madeleine McCann disappearance. So far no charges have been filed against him in that case.

In the case of Ms Behan, Brückner is accused of raping the Irish woman while she was tied and gagged after breaking into her apartment via a balcony at about 3am on June 16th, 2004.

“The accused filmed large parts of the events with a video camera he had brought with him,” the prosecutor said in a statement. “While the accused later fled over the balcony, the victim managed to free herself and, crying, to ask for help.”

The scene of that attack, Praia da Rocha, is a 30-minute drive from Praia da Luz, where three-year-old Madeleine McCann was abducted while on a family holiday in May, 2007.

A second attack, also videotaped by a masked attacker, happened some time between December 2000 and April 2006, according to the prosecutor. This attack, also involving rape and physical violence, was on an unknown woman aged between 70 and 80 in her Algarve holiday apartment.

In a third alleged attack, during the same six-year time period in which Brückner is accused of a violent physical and sexual attack on a 14-year-old girl in his living room.

Brückner is also charged with sexual abuse of minors in two other cases in which he is alleged to have exposed himself to girls aged 10 and 11. The first incident is alleged to have taken placed in Faro on April 7th, 2007 and the second in Bartolomeu de Messines in June, 2017. “The suspect was arrested on the spot by the Portuguese police,” the prosecutor said in relation to that case.

Defence lawyer for Brückner Friedrich Fülscher said he was “amazed” by the indictment. It “leaves out exculpatory aspects” for his client, he said, and was “based almost exclusively on the statements of two dubious witnesses about the content of missing video recordings”.

Ms Behan’s case was reopened after she made a complaint to the London Metropolitan Police Service in 2020, as it is co-operating with the German investigation into Brückner’s alleged crimes.

“My mind was blown when I read how he had attacked a woman in 2005, both the tactics and the methods he used, the tools he had with him, how well he had planned it out,” Ms Behan told the Guardian in 2020. “I puked, to be honest with you, as reading about it took me right back to my experience.”