Madeleine McCann news: ‘Traditional’ evidence will be hard to find after 16 years, forensics expert warns

German prosecutors said on Thursday authorities had secured some items during a search of a reservoir in Portugal in the 16-year-old hunt for missing British girl Madeleine McCann which would be evaluated in coming days and weeks.

“Whether some of the items actually relate to the Madeleine McCann case cannot yet be confirmed,” the prosecutor’s statement read.

German authorities, who have named a suspect in the case, last week helped Portuguese crews comb the remote area inland from the Algarve coastal resort where McCann – then aged three – went missing from her bedroom during a family holiday in 2007.

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Madeleine McCann’s disappearance has puzzled detectives for more than 15 years – but in 2020 a new potential suspect emerged. Now, police are searching a remote reservoir in Portugal’s the Algarve that he used to visit in a renewed effort to shed further light on the case.

German prisoner Christian Brueckner was first named in connection with the unsolved mystery that summer, and officially named as a suspect last year. His yellow and white VW T3 Westfalia campervan was reportedly identified as having been near to the Praia da Luz resort in Portugal where the young girl went missing on May 3, 2007.

Letters written by the prime suspect in the Madeleine McCann case, in which he protests his innocence and tries to claim he had nothing to do with her disappearance, have been revealed for the first time.

Christian Brueckner, who is in jail for rape, penned a series of letters from his prison cell, attempting to distance himself from the unsolved case of the then-three-year-old, who vanished while on a family holiday from Praia da Luz, Portugal, in 2007.

“You can never imagine how it is when the whole world believes you are a child murderer, and you are not,” he wrote in the string of neatly written letters unveiled by MailOnline.

Madeleine McCann, a three-year-old girl from Rothley, Leicestershire, went missing from the Portuguese holiday resort of Praia da Luz on the Algarve on 3 May 2007, a case still unsolved and still the subject of intense interest among the public and press.

Her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, posted a statement on the Find Madeleine website on 3 May 2023 marking the latest anniversary of their daughter’s disappearance, reiterating their hopes of being reunited with her one day and posting a poem, “The Contradiction” by Clare Pollard, to express their feelings.

The long-running hunt for missing Madeleine McCann returned to the headlines last week during a three-day search of a Portuguese reservoir.

Police combed the remote Barragem do Arade in response to what was vaguely described as “certain tips” about an area the prime suspect in the case, Christian Brueckner, regularly frequented between 2000 and 2017.

Although police are remaining tight-lipped about the details, they said they recovered “a number of items” from the scene, which will now be evaluated in the coming days in the hope of shedding light on the ongoing mystery surrounding Madeleine’s disappearance from an Algarve holiday resort on 3 May 2007.

After Madeleine’s disappearance from the family’s rented apartment complex – while her parents and a group of friends ate dinner at an open-air tapas restaurant, a member of the party checking on the otherwise-unattended children every half-hour – the McCanns led the public appeals for information and became fixtures on newspaper front pages and television screens.

They were also subjected to lurid tabloid allegations suggesting that they and their friends might be swingers or, as physicians, might have been in the habit of sedating their children. Others claimed to have spotted inconsistencies in their account of the night’s events, insinuating that they might have been involved in their daughter’s disappearance.

The intensity of the hostility towards the McCanns would later be described by Roy Greenslade of The Guardian as “no journalistic accident” and “a sustained campaign of vitriol against a grief-stricken family”.

The couple were interviewed as “arguidos” (suspects) by the Portuguese authorities in September 2007, with the parents told that police dogs had discovered DNA evidence from the missing girl in the boot of their holiday rental car. They vehemently denied the accusations against them and subsequently launched a libel action against one of the detectives who had gone on to write a book about the case.

After the family returned to England, chief inspector Tavares de Almeida of the Policia Judiciaria in Portimao signed a nine-page report alleging that Madeleine had died in the holiday apartment as a result of an accident (rather than been abducted by a stranger), that the tapas dinner and rota checks had been part of a planned cover-up, that the family’s friends had helped to mislead the police and that the McCanns had concealed her body and then faked a kidnapping.

That official suspicion lingered until July 2008 when Portugal’s attorney general, Fernando Jose Pinto Monteiro, announced that there was no evidence to link either the McCanns or another suspect, local man Robert Murat, to the disappearance after all and closed the case unsolved.

Reflecting on the importance of the twins in keeping their family unit together in a 2017 interview with the BBC’s Fiona Bruce, Gerry McCann said the ordeal had forced them to face “a new normality” in living without their daughter.

Kate McCann added: “What people do say is that you don’t realise how strong you are until you have no option.

“And I think that’s very true. Obviously massive events like this cause a lot of reaction, a lot of trauma and upset.

“But ultimately you have to keep going – and especially when you have got other children involved.

“Some of that is subconscious I think – your mind and body just take over to a certain extent. But if you can’t change something immediately, you have to go with it and do the best that you can.”

The couple also addressed the online abuse they have received, commenting: “I’m sure it is a very small minority of people who spend their time doing it, but it has totally inhibited what we do.

“Personally, we don’t use social media, although we have used it in Madeleine’s campaign.

“But for our twins who are growing up in an era where mobile technology is used all the time, we don’t want them not to be able to use it in the same way that their peers do.”

Ms McCann described the actions of some online commentators as shocking but said she preferred to focus on the support many more members of the public had offered the family.

A suspect in the Madeleine McCann case has claimed he “didn’t” abduct and murder the girl, MailOnline has reported.

In a series of letters, Christian Brueckner – a convicted German rapist – is reportedly saying “I am not a monster” and claiming that he had nothing to do with the abduction or murder of then three-year-old Madeleine McCann.

“The world believes I killed Maddie, I didn’t”, he wrote in the neatly written letters, according to MailOnline.

Letters written by the prime suspect in the Madeleine McCann case, in which he protests his innocence and tries to claim he had nothing to do with her disappearance, have been revealed for the first time.

“You can never imagine how it is when the whole world believes you are a child murderer, and you are not,” he wrote in the string of neatly written letters unveiled by MailOnline.

According to MailOnline, he goes on to say there is no evidence linking him to the case.

“I got told a long time ago that the prosecuter’s office was closing the Maddie case because there is not even the smallest evidence. There will never be a trial,” he wrote.

“The prosecutors are not saying anything to the public because they must give the files to my lawyers – and they contain many (sic) material which confirms my innocence.”

In another one of his letters, written from jail in Germany, he reportedly sketched a long, dark corridor of a prison wing and claimed police and prosecuters are “attempting to create a monster”.

Brueckner then writes about the psychological toll of the case. “The torture I’m going through is the best evidence I can have,” he reportedly wrote.

In his latest letter, he signed off saying: “I’m writing this without self-pity and my self-confidence and self-control was never at a higher level. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Chin up! Better days are coming.”