The main suspect in the disappearance of three-year-old British girl Madeleine McCann has been cleared of a string of sex crimes in an unrelated trial.
Christian Brückner, 47, who is serving a seven-year sentence for rape in Germany, was acquitted of three rapes and two sexual abuses committed in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.
Bruckner has not yet been charged in the case of Madeleine McCann, who disappeared in Portugal in 2007 and remains missing.
Bruckner’s defense team argued that he should be acquitted due to a lack of evidence, although prosecutors called on a court in Braunschweig in northern Germany to impose a further 15 years in prison.
According to prosecutors, the seven-year prison sentence sentenced to Brückner by a Braunschweig court in 2019 will end next September.
His latest trial began in February, and this summer a court lifted an arrest warrant related to the case, which some observers saw as an early sign that Bruckner might be acquitted.
His lawyer Friedrich Fülscher said on Monday that an acquittal was “the only correct outcome in this case” because the identities of the two rape victims, a teenager and an elderly woman, had been changed. Not confirmed.
A key witness told the trial earlier that he broke into Bruckner’s home in Portugal and found films involving the rape of a girl and a woman aged 70 to 80. Raped at age 20.
Prosecutors told the court one of the rape charges should be dropped but sought to ensure he remains in preventive detention until the end of his sentence next year.
