Madeleine McCann

Case background and investigation

Madeleine Beth McCann, a British girl born on May 12, 2003, disappeared on the evening of May 3, 2007, from a ground-floor holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, in the Algarve region of Portugal. She was a few days short of her fourth birthday. According to Wikipedia's account of the case, her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, had left Madeleine and her two-year-old twin siblings asleep while they ate with friends at a restaurant about 55 metres away, and she was found to be missing at about 10 p.m. The twins were unharmed.

The first Portuguese inquiry gave formal suspect (arguido) status to a local resident, Robert Murat, on May 15, 2007, and to Madeleine's parents on September 7, 2007. According to Wikipedia, all three had that status lifted on July 21, 2008, when the Portuguese case was archived. The Guardian has reported that the McCanns were cleared. The Metropolitan Police opened its own review, Operation Grange, in May 2011, and the Portuguese investigation was reopened in October 2013.

In June 2020, Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office and prosecutors in Braunschweig announced that they were investigating a German man then aged 43 on suspicion of Madeleine's murder, Deutsche Welle reported. A spokesman for the prosecutors, Hans Christian Wolters, said they were working on the assumption that she was dead, while British police continued to treat the case as a missing-person inquiry. The man, later widely named as Christian Brückner, had lived in the Algarve between 1995 and 2007 and was in prison for unrelated offences.

On April 21, 2022, Portuguese prosecutors announced that a man had been made an arguido at the request of the German authorities; The Guardian identified him as Brückner and noted that he had not been arrested or charged. Searches followed at the Arade dam, about 30 miles from Praia da Luz, in May 2023, and across scrubland and derelict buildings near Praia da Luz in early June 2025. The Independent reported that the 2025 search ended with limited findings.

Brückner has denied any involvement in the disappearance. According to Wikipedia, a court in Braunschweig acquitted him on October 8, 2024, of five unrelated sexual offences alleged to have been committed in Portugal. He completed a seven-year sentence for the rape of a 72-year-old woman in the Algarve and was released from prison in Germany on September 17, 2025. ABC News (Australia) reported that he was required to wear an electronic tag, report to probation services and surrender his passport, and that his lawyer said charges would already have been brought if the evidence were sufficient.

No one has been charged in connection with Madeleine McCann's disappearance, and she has not been found. No charge or other resolution was identified in the sources reviewed for this record as of September 2026.