The latest man suspected of abducting three-year-old Madeleine McCann in 2007 was allegedly alerted to the empty hotel room by a worker at the hotel the family were staying at.
Christian Brueckner, a 43-year-old convicted German sex offender, was allegedly told by an employee of the Ocean Club in Praia da Luz that the McCann parents would be out for dinner and their apartment would be easy to break into.
A receptionist for the holiday complex left a note at the staff register about the family’s dinner reservation, which is something that Madeleine’s mother Kate remembered in horror a year after the horrific abduction.
“It wasn’t until a year later, when I was combing through the Portuguese files, that I discovered that the note requesting our block booking was written in a staff message book, which sat on a desk at the pool reception for most of the day,” she wrote in her book titled Madeleine.
“To my horror I saw that, no doubt in all innocence and to explain why she was bending the rules a bit, the receptionist had written the reason for our request.
“We wanted to eat close to our apartments as we were leaving our young children alone there and checking on them intermittently.”
A friend of Brueckner is suspected of seeing the note and letting him know about the unsupervised apartment.
Police have since identified the employee who is believed to pass on the information, who also had Brueckner’s number in his mobile contacts.
Brueckner received a half hour phone call in Praia da Luz around an hour before Madeleine went missing.
It’s alleged that Brueckner went to raid the holiday accommodation and found Madeleine sleeping next to her younger brother, twins Sean and sister Amelie.
Brueckner is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for the rape of a 72-year-old American woman in 2005 and also has criminal records for the distribution of child pornography, sexual abuse of children and violations of the Narcotics Act, according to German media.
Hans Christian Wolters, a spokesman for the Braunschweig Public Prosecutor’s Office, told journalists “we are assuming that the girl is dead”.
“In connection with the disappearance of the three-year-old British girl Madeleine McCann on May 3, 2007 from an apartment complex in Praia da Luz, in Portugal, the Braunschweig prosecution is investigating against a 43-year-old German on suspicion of murder.
“With the suspect, we are talking about a sexual predator who has already been convicted of crimes against little girls and he’s already serving a long sentence.”
German authorities are now appealing for more information.
“The hard evidence we don’t have, we don’t have the crucial evidence of Madeleine McCann’s body,” he told Sky News.
“We expect that she is dead, but we don’t have enough evidence that we can get a warrant for our suspect in Germany for the murder of Madeleine McCann.
“At the moment, we also don’t have enough proof for a trial at court, but we have some evidence that the suspect has done the deed.
“That’s why we need more information from people, especially places he has lived, so we can target these places especially and search there for Madeleine.”
This article originally appeared on Over60.