Maddie McCann murder suspect on child sex charges

The man suspected by German authorities of murdering missing British girl Madeleine McCann has a host of previous convictions for crimes including sexual assaults of children.

Madeleine McCann disappeared in Praia da Luz, Portugal on May 3, 2007.

The man suspected by German authorities of murdering missing British girl Madeleine McCann has a host of previous convictions for crimes including sexual assaults of children and the rape of a pensioner.

Named as Christian B. by German media, the 47-year-old with short blond hair was revealed as a suspect in the McCann case in 2020 in a dramatic development in the long-unsolved mystery.

He has yet to be charged in that case, but goes on trial in Germany on Friday for two unrelated child sex offences and three counts of rape.

According to German police, Christian B. lived in the Algarve region of Portugal, where Madeleine disappeared during a family holiday, between 1995 and 2007.

They say he made a living doing odd jobs in the area and also burgled hotel rooms and holiday flats. Police believe he lived in a white Westfalia camper van with yellow skirting at the time of Maddie’s disappearance.

A former neighbour in Portugal told Sky News in 2020 Christian B. was “always a bit angry, driving fast up and down the lane, and then one day … he just disappeared without a word”.

He lived in Hanover from 2007, according to German media, and later split his time between Germany and Portugal for several more years.

When German police searched an allotment the suspect once owned near Hanover, the owner of a neighbouring plot, Wolfgang Kossack, told Britain’s Daily Mail Christian B. had been living off-grid there. “He never did any gardening. He did not plant anything or try to grow anything. He just sat around drinking beer,” Mr Kossack said.

According to Germany’s Bild newspaper, Christian B. was born on December 7, 1976 near Wuerzburg. He grew up in a foster home and he was subjected to neglect and violence, including being locked up in dark rooms and beaten with a belt.

Christian B. was first convicted of sexually abusing children when he was still a teenager, according to Der Spiegel magazine.

By 2020, his criminal record already contained 17 entries, the report said, including driving without a licence, bodily injury, theft and drink-driving.

He went on trial for the first time in Bavaria in 1994 for “abusing a child” and “performing sexual acts in front of a child”, Der Spiegel said.

Then 17, Christian B. received a juvenile sentence of two years, which he only partly served.

In 2016, the district court of Brunswick sentenced him to one year and three months in prison for “creating and possessing child pornographic material”, according to Der Spiegel.

At the time he was revealed as a suspect in the McCann case, Christian B. was in prison in the northern German city of Kiel for drug trafficking. He had also been convicted of the rape in 2005 of a 72-year-old woman in Praia da Luz, the same Portuguese resort where Madeleine went missing.

He is now serving out a seven-year sentence for that crime in Oldenburg, near Bremen.

Following the revelation that Christian B. could be linked to the McCann case, investigators elsewhere in Europe began looking at cold cases of missing children or teens.

Belgium reopened an investigation into the murder of German teenager Carola Titze, 16, who was found dead and mutilated in July 1996 in the resort town of De Haan on the Belgian coast.

In The Netherlands, investigators are taking a closer look at the unexplained disappearance in 1995 of Jair Soares, a seven-year-old boy.

German investigators are also examining whether Christian B. could be linked to the case of a five-year-old girl named Inga Gehricke who disappeared from the town of Schoenebeck in Saxony-Anhalt in 2015.

AFP