The main suspect in the “Maddie” case, a 45-year-old German currently in custody, has been charged with five other alleged rapes and acts of pedophilia, committed between 2000 and 2017 in Portugal.
In detention in Kiel, in northern Germany, he is indicted for three alleged rapes and two sexual assaults on children, announced the Braunschweig prosecutor’s office.
This man, who lived in Portugal for many years, had been identified by German investigators in 2020 as the main suspect in the murder of the British girl.
But the investigations are continuing and the German public prosecutor’s office has not yet brought her to trial for the murder of Madeleine McCann, known as Maddie, who disappeared on May 3, 2007 shortly before her fourth birthday in Praia da Luz, a seaside resort in the south. from Portugal, where she was vacationing with her parents and friends.
Filmed assaults
He is now charged in Germany for five other sexual crimes and offenses committed in Portugal between 2000 and 2017, reinforcing his profile as a repeat sex offender.
The indictment relates to the rape of a woman aged between 70 and 80, committed between 2000 and 2006 and which he had filmed. The victim, assaulted in his second home, had also been whipped.
He is also being prosecuted for tying a naked 14-year-old German girl to a pole, before whipping her and forcing her to have oral sex. Again, the scene was filmed.
The third indictment concerns the rape on June 16, 2004 in Praia da Rocha of a 20-year-old Irish woman in whose home he had managed to enter through the balcony.
The last two charges concern sexual assaults against a 10-year-old German girl on a beach in the district of Faro on April 7, 2007, and on June 11, 2017, in Bartolomeu de Messines, against an 11-year-old Portuguese girl.
The indictment, which is a hundred pages in total, was “preceded by several years of very intensive and costly investigations in several European countries”, explains the Braunschweig prosecutor’s office, seized of the investigations because the suspect lived in this city before going to live in Portugal.
“My colleagues are rather working on these other cases in order to be able to close this project in the near future. When it’s over, we’ll deal exclusively with Maddie,” Hans Christian Wolters, spokesman for the Braunschweig public prosecutor’s office, told AFP in April about the ongoing investigations.
Controversial investigations
The accused has already been convicted, among other things, of sexual assault on children, recalls the prosecution, specifying that he is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for a rape also committed in Portugal, in 2005.
The investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann “is continuing”, assured the Braunschweig prosecutor’s office on Tuesday. “Given the ongoing investigation, it is not possible at this stage to provide further information on the results,” he said.
The disappearance of the child gave rise to an exceptional international campaign to try to find her. Photos of Maddie, with her bobbed light brown hair and big light eyes, have gone viral.
After 14 months of controversial investigations, marked in particular by the indictment of the parents, who were subsequently exonerated, the Portuguese police closed the case in 2008, before reopening the file five years later.
It was not until June 2020 that everything suddenly accelerated, when the Braunschweig public prosecutor’s office announced that it had become certain that the girl was dead and that its suspicions related to the current suspect, then detained as part of another affair.