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The recently freed main suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann has been spotted eating McDonald’s.
Christian Brückner, 48, today finished his seven-year prison sentence in Germany for the rape of an American woman in Portugal in 2005.
Just after 9am, Brückner was driven out of the prison in Sehnde, Lower Saxony, in a black Audi, accompanied by his lawyer and a police escort.
Photographs first obtained by German tabloid Bild show Brückner wearing an ankle bracelet on his right leg outside a McDonald’s.
The fast-food restaurant appeared to be a branch roughly eight miles northwest of the prison in Hannover, according to reports.
The paedophile’s first meal as a free man was a burger, chicken nuggets with sweet and sour sauce and a hot drink, which he ate while smoking.
After 15 minutes, he walked off. His lawyers have declined to say where he will live, but officials are monitoring his location.
Brückner was also asked to surrender his passport and is banned from travelling abroad.
His lawyers plan to appeal the supervision order, with Philipp Marquort telling Der Spiegel: ‘This is the public prosecutor’s attempt to keep him in a kind of pretrial detention where they have access to him at any time.’
Madeleine was just three when she vanished from her family’s holiday rental home in the seaside village of Praia da Luz, in Portugal’s Algarve region, on May 3, 2007.
Her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, say they left Madeleine and her siblings, two-year-old twins, at home while they ate at a restaurant.
Gerry returned to check on the children at 9pm – they were still there – only to find Madeleine missing an hour later.
For years, her family have plastered their daughter’s bright-eyed face on missing persons posters, police appeals and media campaigns.
British, Portuguese and German police have considered hundreds of people as potentially significant, but no one has ever been charged.
German prosecutors believe Brückner is responsible – he has denied wrongdoing and not enough evidence has been obtained to file charges.
Brückner lived in Portugal off-and-on from 1995 to 2007, including working at the Praia da Luz resort as a pool maintenance assistant.
The authorities say mobile phone logs place Brückner near the resort and also have the testimony of three witnesses who say he confessed.
Liam Lane, an associate at the London law firm, Peters & Peters, said the prosecutors need more than circumstantial evidence to bring charges.
Unlike in England, German prosecutors need to persuade judges to let them use circumstantial evidence, as the bar is far higher.
‘It is not the strongest form of evidence – direct evidence, such as an eyewitness or CCTV showing the crime, is the strongest,’ Lane told Metro.
‘The more circumstantial the evidence, the less likely it is that there can be said to be a “realistic prospect of conviction”.’
Lane added that German authorities also have one shot at pinning Brückner due to double jeopardy – a defence that prevents someone from being prosecuted twice for the same crime,
In England and Wales, a person can be tried again if they were acquitted in the first trial.
‘However, in Germany, the position is not the same, and the double jeopardy laws are much stricter,’ Lane said.
‘In a case like this, if the evidence isn’t felt strong enough for a conviction by the German authorities at present, then the double jeopardy law in Germany would be an important consideration, as it would not be as simple to try to prosecute a suspect again following their acquittal.’
British police call Brückner a suspect in their investigation, which they continue to treat as a missing-person case.
The Metropolitan Police filed a request to interview Brückner following his release, but he declined to speak with investigators.
German police named Brückner as a suspect in 2020, some seven years after receiving a tip-off about him during a German TV programme.
Brückner was acquitted in his trial on charges unrelated to the McCann case in 2024, having been accused of five sexual offences.
The sex offender will be back in court in October for a hearing in which he is accused of insulting prison staff.
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