By Lucy Caulkett –
German prosecutors have today announced their presumption that missing Madelaine Mcann is dead, and that they have a new suspect whom they have not yet named.
A spokesman for the missing girl’s parents Kate and Gerry McCann said they had never given up hope their daughter would be found alive but are “being realistic”.
German police said they were investigating the suspected murder of Madeleine and described the 43-year-old man, who has not been named, as a “multiple criminal sex offender who has also been convicted of child sexual abuse”.
Braunschweig state prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters told reporters: “With the suspect we are talking about a sexual predator who has already been convicted of crimes against little girls and he’s already serving a long sentence.”
He said the suspect was regularly living in the Algarve between 1995 and 2007, where he worked jobs in the gastronomy business, but funded his lifestyle by committing crimes, including thefts in hotel complexes and apartments, as well as drug dealing.
A court in Braunschweig heard how he broke into his victim’s house wearing a mask and tied her to a wooden beam with a rope. She was gagged, blindfolded and whipped with a piece of metal before being raped and robbed. He was caught after his DNA was found on hairs at the scene.
Later, the suspect showed his companion a video of himself raping an elderly woman, an American tourist, in Portugal in 2005.
That prompted the informant to call German police to alert them to the suspect around the time of the 10th anniversary of Madeleine’s disappearance.
Last year, the man was convicted of the rape in the Algarve and jailed for eight years.
The distinctive VW camper van he was using at the time of Madeleine’s disappearance – on 3 May, 2007 – was located and shipped to Germany for forensic examination, but has so far yielded nothing useful.
The suspect was 30 at the time and living in a small, remote rented house a couple of miles from Praia da Luz.
Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about German police classifying the investigation as a murder appeal, Mitchell pointed out that the Metropolitan police were still classifying it as a missing person case
Mitchell added: “This is another important chapter in the search for their daughter. They’ve never given up hope that she may still be found alive but they are realistic. They say that whatever the outcome of this particular line of investigation may be, they do need to know what happened to their daughter to find peace and to bring whoever’s responsible to justice.”
The suspect was described as being white, with short blond hair, and around 6ft tall. Now aged 43, in 2007 he was 30, and police said he may have looked as young as 25. The man, who is in prison on an unrelated matter, had been in the Algarve between 1995 and 2007, with short spells in Germany during that time.