The mystery donor who paid the £1,300 court fine that has paved the way a key suspect in the Madeleine McCann‘s case to walk free has been identified as a former police officer.
The woman, who has not been named, claims to have formerly been involved in wire-tapping the jail cell of paedophile Christian Brueckner, The Sun reported.
Brueckner is the main suspect in the unsolved disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann, who vanished from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in May 2007.
The 48-year-old is currently serving a seven-year jail sentence in Germany for the 2005 rape of an American woman, then 72, in the same Algarve resort where Maddie went missing.
The woman who paid the fine is said to be a former member of the BKA, the German equivalent of the FBI.
She told German newspaper Der Spiegel that she was the person responsible for settling Brueckner’s oustanding balance with the courts – but claims her decision to do so was based on a ‘misunderstanding’.
Until now the convicted rapist was only able to raise £210 of the total amount owed, meaning he was set to remain in jail until January 2026.
However thanks to the former officer’s intervention Brueckner is now set to be released on September 17 this year – three weeks time.
The former police officer’s actions appear to undermine her former employer, with German police still seeking to find forensic evidence to charge Christian Brueckner with Maddy’s disappearance.
The woman, who claims to work in ‘Operative Technology Audio’, says that she was previously reponsible for bugging the paedophile’s jail cell.
However, she reportedly thought that the outstanding fine was due only to Brueckner insulting a police officer – a charge she said ‘wasn’t justified’.
She claims that by the time she learnt that the financial penalties related to a number of more serious infringemnts, including bodily harm, it was too late.
The woman told Der Spiegel that the payment was a ‘misunderstanding’ and that she had attempted to reverse it, but to no avail.
The reasons for paying the fine appear bizarre, but the former officer alleges that she has ‘never had any personal contact with Christian B’.
The German newspaper was, however, able to confirm that she had transferred the total sum – £1,300 – into an account belonging to the Braunschweig public prosecutor’s office.
The payment covered outstanding fines on Brueckner’s record, including a 2016 charge for drunkenness in traffic and forgery of documents and another from 2017 for assault.
Hellbound and Down 