The main person accused of making three-year-old Madeleine McCann disappear is going to court in Germany on Friday for different sex crimes.
Christian Brückner will go to court in the city of Braunschweig. He is accused of raping three people and sexually abusing two others between 2000 and 2017 in Portugal.
He is already in prison for seven years for raping someone.
Brückner has not been accused of making Madeleine McCann go missing.
He said he didn’t do it.
A three-year-old girl from Britain went missing from a vacation apartment in Praia da Luz in Portugal in 2007. It’s still one of the most well-known cases of someone who is missing in the world.
Christian Brückner, who is 47 years old, was named by German investigators in 2020 as a suspect in a murder case. He was then formally accused by Portuguese authorities.
But Brückner has not been officially accused in the McCann case, and the German investigation details have not been made public.
Caution: Some of the information about the German case might be upsetting.
On Friday, he will appear in court in Braunschweig, Lower Saxony for the first time since being connected to Madeleine McCann’s disappearance.
He is being accused of five different crimes in Portugal. The trial will be decided by judges, not a jury.
A woman between 70 and 80 years old was raped in her vacation home in Portugal sometime between 2000 and 2006.
Between 2000 and 2006, a girl who speaks German was raped at a house in Praia de Luz where she lived. She was at least 14 years old.
In 2004, a woman from Ireland was raped in her vacation apartment in Praia da Rocha. It is said that the man broke in from her balcony.
In all three instances of rape, Brückner is accused of hitting the victim and recording the attacks.
In 2007, a 10-year-old German girl was sexually abused at a beach in Salema. This happened 3. 5 weeks before Madeleine McCann went missing.
In 2017, during a festival in Bartolomeu de Messines, a man made an 11-year-old girl watch a sex act at a playground.
The trial is happening in the north-western state of Lower Saxony because that’s where Brückner was last officially signed up.
Under German law, he might go to prison for five to 15 years if he is proven to be guilty.
Brückner’s lawyer, Friedrich Fülscher, said before that the accusations are not solid and recently told the BBC that he thinks his client will not say much during the trial.
The lawyer said not to think badly about it.
Christian Brückner was born in Germany in December 1976 and spent time in foster care when he was young.
Authorities say that Brückner lived in the Algarve from 1995 to 2007 and worked in various jobs during that time.
BBC Panorama looked at some of his records from Portugal. They show that he has been convicted many times for small crimes, stealing and rape.
After Madeleine McCann went missing, they didn’t look into Brückner very much.
However, the police in Portugal said they think the parents of the three-year-old are possibly involved.
In 2008, Kate and Gerry McCann’s suspect status was removed, and they were later given an apology for how the police handled their case.
Bruckner moved between Germany and Portugal many times.
He is in jail for seven years for raping a 72-year-old American tourist in Praia da Luz in 2005.
This trial will decide if he stays in jail after his sentence ends in December 2026.