Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brueckner ‘admitted to kidnapping child in Portugal’, ex-cellmate claims

An ex-cellmate of Christian Brueckner, the man suspected of abducting and killing Madeleine McCann, said Brueckner confessed to snatching a child in Portugal.

McCann went missing from her holiday apartment in Praia de Luz, Portugal, in 2007 when she was three years old.

Madeleine's parents Gerry and Kate had left their daughter - as well as her younger twin siblings - in their Algarve apartment to enjoy dinner with their friends at a nearby restaurant.

After returning to the two-bedroom apartment at around 10.00pm, however, did Madeleine's mother discover that the Leicester youngster was missing.

Madeleine vanished in 2007 (PA)

Since then, millions has been invested into the investigation into Madeleine's whereabouts, which has often been branded the 'most reported on missing person's case in modern history'.

Back in 2022, however, prosecutors declared than a German national and convicted paedophile named Christian Brueckner had been charged with several sexual offences allegedly committed in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.

Now, Brueckner's ex-cellmate, Laurentiu Codin, has told a court that he admitted to abducting a child around that time, as per the Mirror.

He said: "He told me that in Portugal, he had stolen there. He was in a region where there are hotels and rich people live. He said there was somewhere with an open window, he told me this. He was looking for money.

"He said he didn’t find any money but found a kid and took the child. He said that two hours later, there were police and dogs all over the place, so he then went away, out of the area.

Brueckner's cellmate has testified in court today (PA)

"I am just saying what he told me. He told me that a person was with him, who he had had an argument with, allegedly it was his woman. He said he took the child in Portugal in his car, and in the time when the police and dogs were at the house, he drove away and he was gone.

"He asked me if the DNA from a child can be taken from bones under the ground.”

Codin added that Brueckner had also confessed to 'abducting and raping young girls', and that he'd made the confession in 2020.

"There was talk of a girl, I don’t know if what he said was true or not," he told the court.

"He said that he had a bus and that he had taken her with it. He said he kept some of them, but not others, but he never said that he had killed them. We’re talking about girls, not boys.

"Not all at once, always one at a time. He told me about two. He said that he had taken someone, had sex with her but he didn’t kill her."