World Courant
The primary suspect within the disappearance of three-year-old British woman Madeleine McCann has been acquitted of a sequence of sexual offenses in an unrelated trial.
Christian Brückner, 47, who’s already serving a seven-year jail sentence in Germany for rape, was acquitted of committing three rapes and two circumstances of sexual abuse in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.
Brückner has not been charged within the case of Madeleine McCann, who disappeared in Portugal in 2007 and has by no means been discovered.
Brückner’s protection workforce had argued that he must be acquitted because of lack of proof, though prosecutors had known as on the court docket in Braunschweig in northern Germany to impose an extra 15-year jail sentence.
The trial started in February and over the summer season the court docket lifted an arrest warrant associated to the case, which was seen by some observers as an early indication that Brückner could possibly be acquitted.
His lawyer, Friedrich Fülscher, mentioned on Monday that an acquittal was “the one right end result of the case” as a result of two of the rape victims, a young person and an older lady, had by no means been recognized.
A key witness had earlier informed the trial that he had damaged into Brückner’s home in Portugal and located movies exhibiting the rape of a woman and a girl aged 70 to 80. An Irish lady later informed the court docket that she had been raped by a person on the age of 21. masked man who broke into her flat in Portugal in 2004.
Prosecutors say his current seven-year jail sentence, imposed by the Braunschweig court docket in 2019, will expire in September subsequent 12 months.
