German investigators illegally obtained hard drive while building case against Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brueckner, his lawyers claim as they bid to have the evidence thrown out of court

The legal team defending Madeleine McCann’s main suspect, Christian Brueckner, is seeking to have a key piece of evidence thrown out of court, arguing that German investigators broke international law by obtaining it.

German police obtained Brueckner’s hard drive from an unnamed female witness in Portugal, which contained sickening cartoons allegedly written by Brueckner.

Now Brueckner’s team is demanding that the Braunschweig Regional Court not officially admit the hard drive as evidence.

Brueckner’s lawyer Friedrich Fülscher said: ‘This is simply not allowed. The German police cannot simply secure evidence in another country without any permission.

‘The Portuguese authorities were not even aware of this. It’s as if the German police just went to England and started a police investigation there and then seized evidence and flew it back to Germany. It’s outrageous!’

Brueckner’s team demands that the Braunschweig Regional Court not officially admit the hard drive as evidence. Pictured in April

The email accounts’ inboxes were completely deleted for the first half of 2007, including when Madeleine ‘Maddie’ McCann (pictured) disappeared

Brueckner’s lawyer Friedrich Fülscher said: “The German police cannot simply go and secure evidence in another country without any permission.”

Details about the hard drive were provided in court yesterday by Titus Stampa, detective commissioner of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), the German equivalent of the FBI.

In addition to details about the hard drive, Stampa revealed that Brueckner had had three email accounts.

Two of them were used to send pornographic photos, including of himself and his erect penis.

Stampa and his colleagues at the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) submitted an application to Microsoft Ireland in 2017 to try to secure access to the account, which they eventually received in 2018 after extensive procedures.

Here they discovered that the inboxes of these accounts had been completely deleted for the first half of 2007, including when Madeleine ‘Maddie’ McCann disappeared.

But when they checked the accounts’ inboxes, they discovered that Brueckner had sent numerous files containing obscene photos, including photos of himself with an erect penis.

In addition, it also contained different versions of two stories, the ‘Mother/Daughter’ story and the ‘Zofen story’.

The first is about a mother and daughter who are captured, transported in a van to a farm, tortured and brutally raped.

The second is about children who decide to take revenge on a pedophile who abused them.

The Public Prosecution Service states that all found this story on a USB stick found during a police investigation in 2016 on the dilapidated Brueckner box factory site in Neuwegesleben.

Convicted rapist Brueckner (pictured), 47, is accused of three rapes and two sexual assaults that allegedly took place on Portugal’s Algarve coast from 2000 to 2017

A view of the apartment complex from which Madeleine McCann disappeared in 2007, in Praia da Luz, on Portugal’s Algarve coast

But the defense has consistently tried to prevent this story from being heard in court, arguing that the police search was unauthorized and that the evidence secured there is therefore inadmissible.

This Tuesday, the court heard from the policewoman who informed her colleagues about a dead dog on Breuckner’s property, prompting a police investigation.

Here, policewoman Katharina Schmidt, 47, admitted to intense cheering from judge Ute Insa Engemann that she had been in Brueckner’s building without any permission.

And she even admitted that she knew it wasn’t supposed to be there, or take pictures, or forward them to the police to investigate.

Given all this, it seemed like the prosecutor had no chance of ever revealing details of this story in court.

But instead, yesterday, by focusing on Brueckner’s emails, the prosecutor indirectly managed to get the harrowing contours of these stories mentioned in court.

However, when it came to the third email, Stampa said he was not authorized to discuss it because it concerned the Madeleine McCann murder investigation.

One of the members of Brueckner’s defense team, Phillip Marquort, said outside the courtroom this morning: “You have to remember that the file containing this story was an RTF file, and these files do not identify the author.”

“So whatever has been written about what happened in court yesterday, these facts remain, and even Mr. Stampa admitted in court yesterday that they cannot know whether my client wrote the story or not, because RTF files do not register the author. ‘

The process continues.