FILIPE AMORIM / AFP
Portuguese police during searches for clues to the disappearance of Maddie McCann, May 25, 2023.
INTERNATIONAL – Will we finally know more about Maddie’s disappearance? The Portuguese police announced that they had ended this Thursday, May 25, the excavations carried out since Tuesday near a lake in the south of the Portugalat the request of the German authorities, within the framework of theinvestigation into the disappearance of the little one Madeleine McCann in 2007.
The judicial police said in a press release that “The material collected will be handed over to the German authorities”who have claimed since 2020 to be convinced that the British girl is dead and suspect a repeat sex offender German already imprisoned in his country for a rape in Portugal.
The police did not give any details on the elements collected or on the purpose of the operation carried out with the participation of German and British investigators, near the banks of a water reservoir located in Silves, a municipality in the tourist region of the Algarve.
The police search for Maddie’s pajamas
What we do know, however, is that between Tuesday and Thursday, investigators surveyed the excavation area using dogs, a drone and a tracked brushcutter. Some portions of the land were combed through using probes, shovels and rakes.
According to local media, investigators collected soil samples and gathered several shreds of fabric found on the spot. Still according to the local press, the police would have been looking for a pink blanket or the pyjamas What Maddie was wearing the night she disappeared.
The Portuguese weekly Expresso specifies that this is the testimony of an informant “considered very credible” by the German investigators which led them to take an interest again in this place.
A source close to the investigation told SkyNews nothing significant was found. German prosecutor Hans Christian Wolter explained that the investigators were looking for “obviously always the body”but “not only, there are other things. Any discovery like clothing could help”.
German suspected of murder
Shortly before celebrating her fourth birthday, Madeleine McCann disappeared on May 3, 2007 from the room of a hotel complex in Praia da Luz, a small seaside resort in the Algarve where she was vacationing with her family, while her parents dined. with friends at a nearby restaurant.
The disappearance of the British girl has given rise to an exceptional international campaign led by Kate and Gerry McCann to try to find her, and remains one of the great crime riddles of recent years.
The region of the Arade dam, located about fifty kilometers from the site of the disappearance of “Maddy”, had already been raked in 2008, including by divers who had found only animal remains. According to local media, the German suspect used to go there regularly and described the place as his “little paradise”.
This man, who is serving a prison sentence in Germany for the 2005 rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Portugal, was identified in 2020 by German investigators as Christian Brueckner, a repeat pedophile now aged 46. years old and having lived several years in the Algarve.
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