Madeleine McCann bombshell: Detectives find emails linking prime suspect Christian Brueckner to toddler

German police have discovered an email account linking prime suspect Christian Brueckner to Madeleine McCann’s disappearance, a court has heard.

Investigators found messages on a Hotmail account used by Brueckner that connected him to the case, detective Titus Stampa said.

The bombshell revelation is the first time an investigating official has alluded to evidence directly connecting Brueckner to the three-year-old’s disappearance from a Portuguese holiday apartment in 2007.

But Mr Stampa said he was unable to share details as the evidence was ‘related to the killing’ of Madeleine. The German authorities believe she was killed.

Brueckner is currently on trial in Germany for unrelated sex crimes. He denies involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance.

Mr Stampa declined to say whether emails recovered included photos or videos implicating the suspect.

He said police had found a second account where Brueckner — a convicted paedophile — had shared media of child abuse with other abusers.

Brueckner allegedly deleted all emails from that account in early 2007, when Madeleine vanished from a hotel resort in Praia da Luz, Mr Stampa said.

“I can remember that things were ‘massively’ deleted in the inbox. There was nothing in there from January 2007,” he told the court.

Brueckner is suspected of taking Madeleine, of Rothley, Leicestershire, from a bedroom in the Ocean Club resort on May 3, 2007.

Her family kept the case open with private detectives until Scotland Yard opened its own investigation in 2011.

German officials named Brueckner as their chief suspect in 2020.

Mr Stampa described an email he claimed was written by Brueckner detailing a fantasy “about a five-year-old girl and her mother who are kidnapped and taken away in a van” before being “abused sexually”.

A copy of the fantasy story was also found in Portugal in 2017 on a laptop used by Brueckner, the court heard.

In May last year, detectives said they were searching a reservoir near Silves in Portugal that Brueckner referred to as his “little paradise”.

Brueckner was jailed in 2019 for seven years after being convicted of raping an elderly woman in the Algarve 14 years earlier.

His defence team has tried to have witnesses ruled out, saying the case is unfair and prejudiced against their client because of the link to Madeleine, but has so far failed.

The trial continues.