A call to witness in the Maddie case brought a German suspect into focus a year ago. New investigations raised hopes that the fate of the British woman could be clarified. But that remains uncertain.
Braunschweig (dpa) – Her 18th birthday should be celebrated on May 12th. But Maddie is not there – she is not with her parents and family in the UK.
Madeleine McCann has been missing for more than 13 years, and the girl’s unexplained fate continues to make headlines today. When investigators surprisingly announced a year ago that a German was suspected of murder, at least hope for late certainty germinated.
It was a spectacular turn when investigators from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), the Metropolitan Police in Great Britain and the Polícia Judiciária in Portugal asked for help from the population via the media on the evening of June 3, 2020. They announced that the suspect was a sex criminal with multiple criminal records and who was in custody for another offense.
The 44-year-old man is now in a prison in Lower Saxony for rape, but has not yet been confronted with allegations in the Maddie case. “No, the accused has not yet been questioned,” said the Braunschweig public prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters at the end of May of the German press agency. The prosecution authority is responsible for the case because the suspect had his last German residence in the Lower Saxony city.
On May 3, 2007, the then three-year-old Madeleine McCann disappeared from an apartment complex in Praia da Luz, Portugal. Since then there has been no trace of her.
Since the publication of the suspect, the enormous interest in the case overshadowed everything that the Braunschweig public prosecutor’s office had previously had to deal with, as Wolters often emphasized. The suspect’s previous life and crimes have been extensively reported since June 2020. So far, however, there have been no significant findings on the Maddie case.
A breakthrough in the investigation is also not in sight in the short term. According to prosecutor Wolters, these will certainly take a few more months, possibly also into the next year or beyond. But it is not unusual if the questioning of an accused – as in this case – is placed at the end of the investigation, emphasized Wolters, who recently regularly rejected information on the case as speculation or simply incorrectly.
Example: a report a few days ago, after which the investigators assume that the girl was killed in Portugal and no longer that she was abducted to Germany. “We have not yet given any information about the specific circumstances of her death and will continue to do so for the time being,” said Wolters. “In the course of the past year there have been no exonerating circumstances in favor of the accused,” he reported on the status of the proceedings. No more and no less.
The girl’s parents recently emphasized that they still have not given up hope of seeing their daughter again. “We cling to the hope, how small she may be, that we will see Madeleine again,” wrote Kate and Gerry McCann on their website. “This year it is particularly painful because we were supposed to celebrate Madeleine’s 18th birthday.” They thanked the authorities for continuing the investigation despite the corona pandemic.
In Portugal, the case has long been causing annoyed reactions. “Maddie? Yet again? Does that never stop? ”Asked the owner of a café in Lagos, very irritated, when asked whether the girl who disappeared 14 years ago was still an issue in the region. Not an isolated case – there has been no sympathy for parents in the Algarve in southern Portugal for years. Rather, there is anger and anger. You feel unjustly treated and stigmatized in Lagos and the adjacent seaside resort of Praia da Luz.
Crime reports aren’t good for the tourism business. The disappearance of a girl is very sad, but there are similar cases every day all over the world. In Lagos this is explained again and again with an annoyed undertone to anyone who dares to address the subject. There is hardly any crime in the region.
At least the Portuguese criminal police have not put the case back on file after it was reopened in 2013. Practically every stone in the Algarve has been turned over over the years, and a large number of the 3,000 or so residents of Luz have been questioned, often several times. There is still no concrete trace.
“As we have often said, we need to know what happened to our wonderful daughter – no matter what it is,” wrote the parents on their 18th birthday, which they had to spend without Maddie.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210530-99-792287 / 4
