Story By: Alex Cope, Sub Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Central European News
The man suspected of having killed Madeleine McCann is now under investigation for the kidnap, rape and murder of this 11-year-old girl in a case which has sat cold for 24 years.
Christian Brueckner, the suspect in the case of the disappearance and believed murder of Madeline McCann, has been named as a potential suspect in the murder of Claudia Ruf in 1996.
Ruf was kidnapped, raped and killed in her home town of Hemmerden in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia before her body was found on a dirt road some 70 kilometres (43 miles) away on a dirt road in the town of Euskirchen, near the city of Bonn.
The case had sat cold for years until November 2019 when local police began carrying out mass DNA testing in the hope of identifying the perpetrator.
Over 2,400 men have reportedly given saliva samples for testing but investigators have not yet found a match.
A spokesperson for the Bonn police confirmed that Brueckner, 43, would now be investigated to see if he had any connection to Claudia’s murder in what was described as a routine process.
Brueckner, 43, has been linked to a series of child abductions and murders in Portugal and Germany since he was named as the main suspect in the Madeline McCann case.
He is in jail in Germany for drug dealing and is appealing against a conviction for the 2005 rape of a woman near the Praia da Luz resort where McCann went missing from in southern Portugal.
Local media recently reported that he is now under investigation for the rape and murder of a 13-year-old boy in Frankfurt whose testicles and buttocks were removed from his body.
He was named by the Frankfurter Neuer Presse as a potential suspect in the murder of Tristan Brubach in March 1998.
Brubach’s body was found in an underpass known as the Liederbach near the Frankfurt-Hochst train station in the city of Frankfurt in the German state of Hesse.
He had been beaten unconscious, strangled, raped and tortured, according to reports.
The cause of death was a long cut to his throat and his body had been mutilated, with both testicles and the flesh from the buttocks and thighs having been removed.
The removed body parts were never recovered.
Chief Prosecutor Noah Kruger told German daily newspaper Bild: “We are checking whether there are any connections between the two cases. In itself, however, this is not unusual, but routine. The sequence of events and the e-fit from the Tristan case could be similar. ”
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