Search for the body of Maddie McCann, Germany July 28, 2020. -
Rainer Droese / SIPA
He will stay in jail.
European justice has rejected the appeal of the main suspect in the disappearance of little Briton Maddie McCann.
The proceedings involved a conviction in another rape case.
German Christian B. was sentenced in December 2019 to seven years in prison for the rape and theft of a 72-year-old American in 2005 in Portugal, in the same village of Praia da Luz where Maddie had disappeared in May 2007 But he challenged the validity of the European arrest warrant (EAW) under which he was apprehended in Italy in 2018 and then handed over to the German authorities, and had seized the German Federal Court of Justice to challenge his conviction in this rape.
This in turn had referred to the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU), which sits in Luxembourg.
Denial of early release
The arrest warrant originally concerned a drug trafficking case for which Christian B. is currently serving a prison sentence in Kiel, northern Germany.
He had requested early release before the scheduled deadline of January 7, 2021 and could have been released if the European Court had overturned the sentence for the rape in Portugal.
But the latter rejected his request, arguing that the Italian authorities had given their consent for him to be prosecuted for this rape case.
"He is no longer entitled to invoke the rule of specialty relating to this first term", she decided Thursday.
This decision means that once his prison sentence for drug trafficking has been served, Christian B. will have to serve the one for rape, while the investigation still continues in the Maddie case.
The 40-year-old was identified only a few months ago as the number one suspect in the murder of the three-year-old girl, who was on vacation with her parents when she disappeared one evening from the hotel room where she was sleeping.
The suspect lived at the material time a few kilometers from this hotel, in the small Portuguese seaside resort of Praia da Luz.
Other cases under verification
In mid-June, the Brunswick public prosecutor's office had explained that it had "evidence or concrete facts" supporting the conviction of the death of the girl but not "forensic evidence" in the sense that, for example, the remains of the body would have been found.
German investigators do not exclude that Christian B., also convicted of rape in Portugal, may be involved in other cases not yet clarified.
They are therefore studying a possible parallel with a case of disappearance, that of little Inga in 2015 in a forest in the German region of Saxony-Anhalt.
Several other unsolved murders of children and adolescents in Europe, notably in Belgium and the Netherlands, are also being checked.
In addition to the Maddie affair, Christian B. is also the subject of an investigation for sexual assault on a girl aged 10 at the time of the facts in the Algarve in April 2007, a few weeks before the disappearance of the little Briton. .
"He is accused of having masturbated in front of the child," said Hans Christian Wolters, specifying that this investigation was opened last year.
And on Tuesday, Brunswick prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters confirmed to AFP the opening in June of a new investigation into the rape of a young Irish girl in 2004 in the Algarve region, where Madeleine McCann had disappeared.
The victim had lodged a complaint just after the facts 16 years ago but it was when she discovered in the media at the beginning of June photos of the main suspect, the German Christian B., that she came forward "because she believes he recognized his attacker ”.
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