Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brueckner ‘confessed to abducting girl from Algarve apartment’ former cellmate claims

Christian Brueckner, the suspect in Madeleine McCann’s murder, has confessed to a fellow inmate that he took a child from a Portuguese apartment, a court in Germany heard today.

The 47-year-old pedophile is said to have asked Laurentiu Codin in 2020, when they shared a cell together, whether he was also in prison for child sex crimes.

The convicted rapist then admitted taking “a child” during a burglary when he lived in the Algarve, the court was told.

This comes after German detectives sensationally named Brueckner as the prime suspect in the abduction of three-year-old British woman Maddie from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in May 2007.

Speaking today at the Braunschweig Regional Court, where Brueckner is on trial for other sex crimes, Codin told a story that bore striking similarities to the night Maddie disappeared.

Madeleine McCann (pictured) disappeared on May 3, 2007 at the age of just three. She has never been found. German criminal Christian Brueckner has been named by German prosecutors as their prime suspect in her disappearance

‘He told me that he stole in Portugal. He was in an area where there are hotels and rich people live.

‘He said there was a window open somewhere, he told me this. He was looking for money.

‘He said he didn’t find any money, he found a child and he took the child. He said two hours later there were police and dogs everywhere, so he left, out of the area.

‘I’m just saying what he told me. He told me that there was someone with him, with whom he had had an argument, it was said to be his wife.

‘He said he had taken the child in his car to Portugal, and that he had driven away when the police and the dogs were at the house.

‘He asked me if a child’s DNA could be extracted from bones underground.’

In his disturbing testimony, Codin, 50, said Brueckner confided his crimes to him when they were both in custody in the same prison.

‘There was talk about a girl, I don’t know if what he said was true or not. He said he had a bus and he took her. He said he kept some of them but not others, but he never said he killed them.

“We’re talking about girls, not boys. Not all at once, always one at a time. He told me about two. He said he took someone, had sex with her, but he didn’t kill her.”

When the judge asked him how old his victim was, Codin said, “I don’t want to say it the wrong way, but he was very young, small. I mean young.”

‘Every time we were together he talked about it, because he was convinced I was a pedophile.’

Pictured: The holiday park where the McCanns were staying in the Algarve, Portugal in May 2007 when their three-year-old daughter disappeared without a trace

Brueckner is serving a seven-year prison sentence for the 2005 rape of American pensioner Diana Menkes, 72, in the Algarve.

He is on trial in Braunschweig for separate sexual offences allegedly committed in the Algarve between 2000 and 2017.

Brueckner is on trial for, among other things, the alleged rape of 40-year-old Irish tour representative Hazel Behan in her apartment in Praia da Rocha in 2004.

He has also been charged with the alleged rape of a teenage girl at his home in the same city and with the rape of an elderly woman at her holiday apartment.

Brueckner is also accused of exposing himself to a German girl on a beach in Salema in April 2007 and to an 11-year-old girl in 2017.

His current sentence ends early next year, and if he is found not guilty in the ongoing trial, he could be released from prison. The trial is expected to end in December.