Brueckner has repeatedly tested police officers’ patience since being released from jail, including one incident when he is said to have briefly managed to escape them on a bicycle
Madeleine McCann prime suspect Christian Brueckner has been accused of playing “a game of cat and mouse” with German police.
The convicted paedophile, 49, has been under 24-hour police surveillance since his release from jail last September and has just moved areas for at least the fourth time since his release, leaving the city of Branschweig to move further north to the Schleswig-Holstein region.
Police say he has regularly attempted to give officers the slip in recent weeks. Braunschweig police spokesperson Lars Dehnert said: “It is true that Christian B. regularly played a game of cat and mouse with the police. He was clearly not amused by the constant surveillance he was under in Braunschweig.”
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Brueckner is German prosecutors’ prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine, three, in Praia da Luz, Portugal in May 2007. He was jailed for seven years for raping a US pensioner in the same Algarve resort where the youngster went missing before being released from jail last September.
According to reports, Brueckner has repeatedly tested police officers’ patience in the period since – especially when drinking alcohol. During one incident, he is said to have briefly managed to escape officers on a bicycle before dialling the German emergency number and asking them where his escort had gone.
The Mirror has also been told Brueckner, who is living on benefits and has to wear a monitoring tag for five years, has boasted of being able to repeatedly sneak out of his most recent bolthole under the cover of darkness without watching police spotting him.
It is understood he packed up and left Brauschweig last week. Dehnert said: “Christian B. has not been in Braunschweig since Friday. He is currently in another federal state. Consequently, police escort duties have also been handed over.”
The fiend had been living in a two-room flat in Braunschweig, close to a kiosk he previously owned before being named in connection with the infamous case in 2020. But he faced a furious backlash from his new neighbours, including a petition to drive him out.
Before moving to Branschweig, Brueckner spent months drifting across other areas of northern Germany following his release from prison in September last year after serving a seven-year sentence for the 2005 rape of a 72-year-old woman in the same resort where Madeleine vanished.
He initially registered himself as homeless in Neumünster and was given an apartment. But after residents discovered where he was staying and threats were made against him, police moved him north to the city of Kiel, where he spent months living in a tent in a forest. Authorities later provided him with a container in the area, but he only remained there for a few days before moving back to Branschweig.
Last year Brueckner was tried in Braunschweig on three further rape charges and two counts of child abuse, but was acquitted. During that trial, a psychological expert described him as belonging to the “absolute top league of dangerous offenders.”
The expert warned that if he were set free, his probability of committing another serious offence within two years could be between 30 and 50 per cent. The acquittal is not yet final. Prosecutors in Braunschweig have appealed the verdict and the case is now being reviewed by Germany’s Federal Court of Justice in Leipzig.
Brueckner denies any involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance. He has said: “There will be no charges against me in the Maddie case. That is because I am innocent.”
