Madeleine McCann murder suspect paedophile past, slipped through net of investigators
The main suspect in the Madeleine McCann case twice slipped through the net of Portuguese investigators, court documents and witness testimony suggest.
Sky News reports that Court documents from the suspect’s conviction for fuel theft in the Algarve in 2006, a year before Madeleine vanished, reveal that he hid his paedophile past.
Asked by a judge to list his previous crimes, he admitted to a conviction for sex abuse in Germany when he was a juvenile, but didn’t reveal his victim was a young girl. The court stenographer recorded: “When he was 17 years old he was convicted in Germany for burglaries and sex crimes.”
According to the report, Serafim Vieira, the Portuguese lawyer who defended him in a Portimao court, said: “He didn’t tell the judge it was a paedophile crime and the judge was not obliged to ask for the German police files or investigate it. The crime was more than ten years earlier and had no bearing on the theft crime he had just admitted.
It meant that Christian B wasn’t registered in Portuguese police files as a paedophile and was not among the dozens of known paedophiles who were questioned as potential suspects when Madeleine vanished. Mr Vieira said: “Everyone is blaming the Portuguese police, but you should ask the German authorities if they sent a list of all the German paedophiles living in Portugal.” Christian B was kept in jail on remand for eight months before he was fined with a friend for stealing 300 litres of diesel fuel from two trucks.
A social worker’s assessment of him in the court documents reads: “He has an unstable past with no family roots and he is a loner. He has an errant past.” Five months after he was freed, Madeleine vanished from her family’s rented apartment in Praia da Luz, in the Algarve, in May 2007.
