Today, Thursday 25 May, the new searches around the reservoir of the Arade river, in the Algarve, were concluded, in search of clues on the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the three-year-old English girl who disappeared on May 3, 2007 in Praia da Luz, where she was spending her holidays with her family. The Portuguese police have made it known, through a statement, that the procedures requested by their German colleagues have been completed and that the material collected after three days of research will be analyzed in Germany. The investigators, who lean towards the hypothesis of the killing of the little girl, have never declared that her body was being searched for on the Arade river, 50 km from where the little girl disappeared, nor can it be excluded that from these further searches emerge clues about any other crimes committed by Christian Brueckner, the 47-year-old formally suspected of having kidnapped and killed Maddie and has been in prison in Germany since 2019 for various crimes of sexual violence committed between 2000 and 2017 also in Portugal, where he lived between 1995 and 2007. According to the study of telephone records, in fact, on May 3, 2007 the suspect was near the Ocean Club of Praia da Luz, the tourist facility where the McCann family spent their holidays and from whose apartment the girl disappeared while the parents were at dinner a few meters away. Between Tuesday and Thursday, the investigators combed the reservoir in the area, in a small spit of land surrounded by trees which in some depositions Brueckner himself had described as a “little paradise” where he used to seclude himself. The place had already been the scene of searches in 2008 on the initiative of a lawyer from Madeira, Marcos Aragão Correia, who received a report according to which the little girl would have been thrown into the water in those parts.
Cover photo: ANSA/KOEN SUYK | Madeleine McCann’s parents
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