The disappearance of Madeleine McCann was the first global trauma before social networks made traumas daily. No one has yet managed to explain, 18 years later, what happened in that room of a tourist urbanization in Praia da Luz, in the Portuguese Algarve, where the three -year -old girl slept with her 18 -month twin brothers on the night of May 3, 2007, while her parents, the British doctors Kate and Gerry McCann, had dinner along with seven friends in a restaurant in the complex as every night.
Throughout this week new searches have been made in the Lagos area, where ruins in ruins have been tracked, to try to find, considered by the German prosecutor’s office the main suspect of the death of the little girl since 2020 and charged by the Portuguese Judicial Police two years later. For investigators, led by prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters, it can be the last opportunity to formally accuse this fall, after serving a sentence for violating in 2005 a 72 -year -old woman in the Algarve, where the German resided several years.
In Portugal, the operation has raised skepticism. “I do not have many expectations about the indications that can be collected. It has spent a lot of time since the crime and many people have passed through those scenarios, which will have damaged the possible clues,” says Hugo Franco, a journalist from the weekly courts of the weekly Express. Both the Portuguese Judicial Police, who participated in the tracking, and the McCann have declined to comment on the recent investments to El País.
In 2007, Madeleine’s disappearance became a media, police and political boiler that contributed to making mistakes during the investigation, to pursue false guilty and sell many tabloids in London. Praia da Luz, a paradise for British retirees and tourists with a hunger of sun where Paul McCartney had spent a family vacation in 1968, became the heart of a tragedy that moved the world. Little Maddie began to be seen everywhere without any clue helping to solve a mystery, which disturbed equally in Portuguese and Downing Street, 10.
As a recapitular: only the BBC sent 18 journalists to the Algarve, the parents made an international tour that included an audience with the Pope, some millionaires – like the writer JK Rowling and businessman Richard Branson – offered astronomical rewards and the British prime minister Gordon Brown, who had lost her first daughter five years before the disappearance of Madeleine, overturned The family. Both the ambassador to Lisbon and senior officials of the British government moved to Praia da Luz.
However, research was not an example of bilateral cooperation. The old political alliance between the two countries, with six centuries of history, did not serve to go hand in hand. The British press attacked the work of local investigators, especially when they directed their suspicions towards Madeleine’s parents, although they would not get rid of the sensational furies of London who would reach the courts (several media compensated for their slander to the couple). Gerry and Kate McCann would end up being charged in Portugal for several months, as well as a British resident from Praia da Luz, Robert Murat, although the three were finally exempted from suspicions. And he reopened five years later.
The German Christian Brückner, 48, is the room charged by the Portuguese Judicial Police, although this decision was motivated to avoid. Brückner inquiries are in the hands of the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation of Germany (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA). Against him there are testimonies of former colleagues, the detection of his mobile in the area of Praia gives light the night of disappearance and a history of pedophilia and sexual violence. Last October, a Braunschweig court acquitted him for insufficient evidence of five crimes (three of rape and two of sexual abuse) committed between 2000 and 2017, also in the Algarve.
Helge Büsching and Manfred Seyferth, two illegal runners of Christian Bruckner who resided in a tummy, in the Alpujarra Granada, have told the police that Bruckner confessed that he knew what had happened. The truth is that, five years after being presented as suspicious, German research has not informed of the obtaining of conclusive evidence against him or in his properties in Germany, where pornographic material, children’s swimsuits and toys, or in searches in Portugal was discovered. In 2023, the Arade reservoir was traced without success, 50 kilometers from Praia da Luz, to look for the body of Madeleine McCann. 80% of the combed area this week, around Lagos, had already been examined by the Portuguese police in the past.
For Gonçalo Amaral, the inspector of the Judicial Police who directed the investigation in the first months, until it was sectioned, the new searches will not contribute anything. “This German is a scapegoat, they wanted to invent a story, but so far there is nothing in the summary that points to him, everything is based on witnesses who say they heard something say,” he says. In 2021, Amaral published the book Maddie: Just lies!where it exposes failures of German investigation against Brückner.
The former inspector was denounced by the McCann for his first work, Maddie: The truth of the liebefore the Lusitanian justice and. Amaral criticizes that the Portuguese police do not advance in all lines of investigation that are pending and that there are lagoons without clarifying as the medical history of Madeleine, the analysis of their hair to determine if it had ingested any inducing medication of the sleep, the history of the British who died with the McCann or the reconstruction of the facts. “18 years have passed and we still don’t know anything about the victim’s profile. For example, the brand in the eye can be a sign of a cardiac ailment,” he says. “The British made a pseudo -construction with actors, but not with the real protagonists and that would have been very useful to see contradictory elements. There is a protection of parents and their friends. In fact, the British police leave the Algarve when the McCann leave,” he adds.
One of the great unknowns that still does not respond surrounds the open clues for the work of trained dogs sent from London. The animals detected blood and smell of corpse in the apartment and the car rented by the family. “At first, it is said that body fluids are from a descendant of the McCann and a week later it stops saying. That change occurs after a visit from the father to the laboratory,” criticizes the former inspector.
In 2010, they found something that the British authorities did not recognize in public. To his American colleague, Alfred Hoffman, who turned the parents into suspects came from the work of the British police itself.
After 18 years, what happened with Madeleine McCann seems to be sentenced to the drawer of the unresolved enigmas.
