Madeleine McCann key witness speaks for first time

The man who alerted authorities to Madeleine McCann prime suspect Christian Brueckner has claimed the girl’s suspected murderer said she ‘didn’t scream’ and that Scotland Yard ignored his tip-off, in his first ever public interview.

Key witness Helge Busching explained how he came to know about Brueckner’s shady past by discovering harrowing sexual abuse videos, and how his former acquaintance appeared to incriminate himself in Madeleine’s disappearance. 

Helge said he learned of Brueckner’s true nature well before the disappearance of McCann after stealing some videotapes and gun from Brueckner’s house along with an accomplice. 

Remembering the moment he witnessed the clips, which purportedly showed Brueckner sexually abusing an elderly American woman and a teenage girl in Portugal, Helge recounted: 

‘You could see how someone whipped the woman. She was tied up, lying on the bed, wearing painted ski goggles… must have been 70 or 80 years old. She shouted: You fucking b******!… then I saw it was Brueckner.

‘[The teenage victim] said: ”This borders on rape!” And he just said: ”Shut up.” That’s when I knew what kind of guy Brueckner was.’

Helge then left Portugal, but told German outlet Bild how he crossed paths with Brueckner, who has since been convicted for sex crimes, again in 2008 at a music festival in Spain.

‘He asked me, ”don’t you go to Portugal anymore and do business there?” 

‘I said, ”no, since the girl disappeared there, there have been too many police checks for me and I don’t need that at all.”

‘[The topic of Madeleine’s disappearance] came up and I said: ”Anyway, I don’t understand how the little one could have disappeared without a trace.”

‘Christian had drunk two or three beers, and he said: ”She didn’t scream.”

‘I thought: He knows that. He has something to do with it. But he also checked that I understood that and then left at night. 

‘At 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning he left a packed festival with his mobile home. I looked for him the next morning, but his neighbours said he had left.’

Helge went on to claimed he’d approached German authorities after finding the videotapes, but that a policeman told him to abandon them and keep quiet.

‘I spoke to a police officer I know in Germany. He said: ”Helge, keep your hands off it.” A lawyer told me the same thing. I wasn’t sure what could happen to me – I would have incriminated myself!’

He added that he tried to inform Scotland Yard about Brueckner in 2008 via the dedicated hotline for Madeleine McCann tips, but never heard back.

‘I called Scotland Yard back in 2008. At the Maddie hotline. I said I knew someone who might have something to do with it and gave them the name. But nothing happened there. Nothing! I was never called back.

‘In 2017 I had just served a prison sentence in Greece. When I heard about the 10th anniversary of the disappearance, I remembered. Apparently the call didn’t help at all. So I contacted Scotland Yard again.

‘Then they listened to me.’

Madeleine was staying with her family at a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal when she disappeared in May 2007.

The case, unsolved for the past 16 years, remains a mystery as no body has ever been found. 

Last month, investigators combed a reservoir in the Algarve for the videotapes, a camcorder and the gun tossed by Helge and his accomplice Manfred Seyferth after they stole the materials from Brueckner’s house.

An area of around 160 square feet had been flattened and cleared of grass and shrubs with several holes dug into the ground to a depth of around two feet.

There were also other holes dug into the foreshore close to the waterline and path close to the edge of the reservoir had been cleared.

It is thought the soil removed was taken away by German officials for closer analysis at a lab in Wiesbaden where the country’s investigative force, the BKA, are based.

Germans Seyferth and Busching were living on the Algarve at the same time as Brueckner and the two were involved in petty theft with him before having a falling out.

Footage on the video camera was said to show Brueckner torturing and raping an American woman, with footage of a girl around 15 years old also subjected to the same horrific ordeal.

In 2019 Brueckner was convicted by a German court of the rape of an elderly American woman in her home at Praia da Luz close to where Madeleine vanished, and was given a seven-year sentence.

He denies any involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance. 

Madeleine was staying with her family at a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal when she disappeared in May 2007.

It was the penultimate day of the holiday when Madeleine went missing.

After a day of activities, Kate and Gerry McCann put their three children to bed at around 7pm.

Madeleine fell asleep in pink pyjamas and the parents relaxed with a bottle of wine.

At around 8:30pm, the McCanns joined their friends for a meal at the Tapas bar nearby.

Gerry McCann checked on Madeleine and her siblings at 9pm and found nothing amiss.

When Kate McCann went to check up on the children at 10pm, she found Madeleine had disappeared.

‘Madeleine’s gone! Someone’s taken her!’ she was reported to have said, running back to the restaurant.

Around the same time, a man was seen carrying a child matching Madeleine’s description. 

Investigators looked into claims a friend of the family, James Tanner, had seen a man carrying a sleeping child in pink pyjamas away from the apartment block at around 9:10pm on May 3, but the evidence was later discounted. Police said the man seen with the child was another holidaymaker with their own child.

Days turned into months and hundreds of police officers were called in to support the search. Possible sightings were reported. Seven months after her disappearance, a lorry driver told investigators he had seen a woman handing a man a child near Silves, a slightly quieter town due northeast of Praia da Luz.

Astonishingly, Portuguese police named Gerry and Kate McCann as suspects in the case after four months without results. They said they found incriminating DNA evidence at the holiday apartment and in the boot of their hire car. This line of inquiry was later dropped.

In July 2008, 14 months since Madeleine’s disappearance, Portugal’s attorney general ended the investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance after they had failed to uncover any evidence.

The case was handed over to private investigators working for the family until the Met issued new sketches of potential suspects in 2013. Investigators were the first to scour the reservoir now being searched in 2008 – 12 years before authorities said they were looking into a new German suspect.

Again, the investigation struggled to produce definitive results until authorities said they were investigating a 43-year-old in connection to the disappearance, later named as Christian Brueckner.

In 2020, authorities revealed a phonecall had located Christian Brueckner in Praia da Luz, where he lived from 1997 until 2007, around the time of Madeleine’s disappearance.

They traced the call and found it connected to the mast owned by the resort complex where the family had stayed. 

Brueckner had lived in a warehouse outside the village for several years but moved into a VW campervan just before Madeleine vanished. 

A Mail on Sunday investigation later found that Brueckner stayed in an old house in nearby Foral between 2007 and 2008 – after Madeleine’s disappearance.

That year, it was revealed that a witness claimed to have spotted Madeleine getting into a German-owned VW van with a man just weeks after her disappearance.

A police file detailed how a witness believed that had seen Madeleine emerging from a restaurant in the Spanish seaside town of Alcossebre in eastern Spain, before climbing into the van with an unidentified man.