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The prime suspect in the 2007 disappearance of 3-year-old Madeleine McCann allegedly made a chilling claim to a friend shortly after the British toddler’s vanishing made headlines.
“She didn’t even scream,” Christian Brueckner, 45 — a German man named a suspect in the McCann case just over a year ago — allegedly told his friend Hedge B. as the two discussed the case back in 2008.
Hedge B.’s full name has not been released by investigators, but his account was crucial to pinpointing Brueckner as a suspect in the child’s disappearance.
He recalled Brueckner’s hair-raising comments during a recent interview with a German tabloid, Bild, according to CBS News, in some of the first public comments he’s made on the case.
Brueckner is currently serving a life sentence for the 2005 rape of an elderly American woman he committed in Algarve, Portugal, close to where the 3-year-old disappeared from her family’s apartment.
Hedge B. once considered Brueckner a friend, until one day at his apartment, he allegedly discovered videos of Brueckner sexually assaulting women, he told Bild.
“I could not believe it at all,” he said.
The two fell out of contact after that incident but met up in Spain at a music festival a year after McCann vanished.
On that trip, Hedge B. recalled Brueckner asking if he still visited Portugal for business, to which he replied that since McCann’s disappearance there had been frequent police checks for travelers.
“I don’t understand anyway how the little girl could disappear without a trace,” Hedge B. recalled saying.
Brueckner then responded with his eyebrow-raising comments about McCann not screaming when she was taken.
Hedge B. said Brueckner must have sensed his suspicion over the exchange because the next day he was gone without a word.
After the incident in Spain, Hedge B. said he reported it to authorities in London a number of times but never received a response.
Finally, in 2018, the German Federal Criminal Police reached out to Hedge B. and asked him to testify about the assaults he’d seen on video in Brueckner’s apartment.
Hedge B. suspected Brueckner planned only to break into the McCann’s apartment, but decided to take Madeleine after coming across her, he told Bild.
“That probably wasn’t planned at all,” he said, adding that he believed Madeleine was probably dead.
“Whether he ended up killing her, I don’t know.”
Brueckner has denied any connection to the McCann case.
In May, a number of letters he’d sent from his German prison cell lamenting the world’s presumption of his guilt were released by the Daily Mail.
“You can never imagine how it is when the whole world believes you are a child murderer, and you are not,” he wrote.
The letters came just as investigators said they’d recovered possible evidence after combing a reservoir in Portugal.
“A previously precisely defined area along the reservoir was completely searched for possible evidence. A number of items were seized as part of the operation. These will be evaluated in the coming days and weeks,” Germany’s Braunschweig Public Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement.
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