Child killer ‘not the new suspect’ police are investigating in Maddie case

The mystery around the new Madeleine McCann suspect Portuguese police are investigating has deepened after new reports about their identity.

German child killer Martin Ney is not the new Madeleine McCann suspect Portuguese police are investigating, according to reports.

Portuguese media revealed on Friday that police had a “new lead and a new suspect” in the case of the missing girl — but they did not publish the name of the man investigators are looking at.

Many media outlets were convinced that 48-year-old convicted German paedophile Martin Ney was the new prime suspect. But Correio da Manha reported today that the jailed child killer is not the new suspect at the centre of local cops’ probe.

It said: “A German paedophile, serving life for the murder of three children and the sexual abuse of dozens more youngsters, was named by the British press as a Madeleine McCann suspect.

“However this is not the new suspect that the Policia Judiciaria in Porto is investigating.”

Ney was jailed for life in 2012 for abducting and murdering three children, and sexually abusing dozens more.

A former resort worker yesterday told the Mirror they had seen Ney in Portugal, right around the time the toddler vanished. He was staring “intently” at them and some female friends as they drank in a bar in Praia da Luz, they said.

A former worker at the resort from which Madeleine McCann went missing has claimed they saw the new suspect in the area at the time. Picture: AP Photo/PA

According to the source, who asked not to be named, Ney was in the Algarve “for a fact”.

They said: “I have a very good memory for faces. I remember him looking at us intently.”

The former worker at the Ocean Club resort, where the McCanns were staying when Maddie vanished in May 2007, said they recognised Ney after they saw a photograph of him in one of yesterday’s newspapers.

They said they also saw him in a local supermarket, close to where the McCanns were staying.

WHO IS MARTIN NEY?

Goncalo Amaral, the Portuguese cop who first led the hunt for Madeleine, claimed last week that police were probing a “German paedophile who is in prison”.

German murderer Martin Ney, 48, is a new suspect in the British girl’s disappearance from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal Picture: Supplied

Ney was working for an evangelical church on a project for the homeless in Portugal when Madeleine disappeared, it’s claimed. Ney also looks like a photofit of a man who was seen acting suspiciously before Madeleine vanished from her Portuguese holiday apartment 12 years ago.

The youth worker dressed in black and donned masks and balaclavas while carrying out his attacks.

Ney was said to have been familiar with the Algarve after travelling widely in Portugal in the 1990s. He was jailed for killing three German kids — Stefan Jahr, 13, in 1992, Dennis Rostel, eight, in 1995, and Dennis Klein, nine, in 2001.

He is also suspected of the murder of a child in Holland in 1998 and another in France in 2004.

. Maddie vanished just before her fourth birthday, after parents Kate and Gerry left their children in the apartment while they went out to eat close by.

‘PREPARING THE END OF THE INVESTIGATION’

The timings raise the possibility Ney murdered a youngster every three years — 1992, 1995, 1998, 2001 and 2004, before Madeleine vanished in May 2007.

She disappeared days before her fourth birthday after parents Kate and Gerry left their children in their apartment in Praia da Luz while they went out to eat.

Scotland Yard launched its Operation Grange investigation in 2013 and still has a team working on Madeleine’s disappearance.

Mr Amaral revealed on Australian TV that British cops were focusing on a jailed German.

He also claimed it had “one investigation line” — and was ignoring other possibilities.

Maddie as she looked when she disappeared, left, and a computer generated age progression image of the missing child as she might look now. Picture: AP Photo/PA, Metropolitan Police, Teri Blythe

Mr Amaral said: “Detectives are preparing the end of the investigation, with a German paedophile who is in prison right now.”

On Friday, Portuguese newspapers also reported that Metropolitan Police detectives had provided information about a foreign paedophile.

A recent Netflix documentary on the case focused on a suspect who targeted British holiday-makers’ apartments in Praia da Luz in 2007. The man, who wore a surgical mask and had a foreign accent, preyed on children and replied “yes” when one girl woke up and asked if he was her daddy.

Scotland Yard is known to have been in contact with German detectives over Ney.

Well-placed sources also confirmed yesterday Ney’s internet chatroom history — using the name GerdX — had been probed.

The McCanns have been searching for their lost daughter for 12 years, in a case that has gripped the world. Picture: AFP Photo / Pool / Joe Giddens

In a chilling post from 2002 he wrote: “I bought a camouflage suit to jump out of the bushes in children’s playgrounds if a beautiful boy goes past.”

Ney’s known victims are boys, but clinical psychologists say gender is often unimportant to paedophiles. Private detectives working on behalf of the McCanns also previously looked into Ney, whose horrific crime spree is believed to have started in Germany in 1992.

CAGED FOR LIFE

He also started travelling around the same time after finishing teacher-training at the age of 21.

Police know he visited Ecuador in 1993, Peru in 1995 and Portugal the following year. He has also made repeated trips to Holland and Denmark. Ney was finally arrested in April 2011 after a massive police operation.

He confessed to the three German murders and sexually abusing 40 other children, and was jailed for life.

Ney, who told cops he murdered to cover up his abuse, has denied during police interviews involvement in any other child crimes.

But he has been suspected of murdering Nicky Verstappen, 11, who vanished from a holiday camp in Brunssum, Holland, in 1998.

This article originally appeared on The Sun and is published here with permission.

Originally published as Child killer ‘not the new suspect’ police are investigating in Maddie case