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A British expat claims the key suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann tried to recruit a mutual friend a week before the young girl was abducted in Portugal.
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According to Sky News, Christian Brueckner, a convicted pedophile and rapist who is the primary suspect in three-year-old McCann’s disappearance, wanted help from another friend, a homeless man living in the Algarve region, to kidnap a toddler to sell to a childless couple.
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The shocking statement about a kidnapping plot comes from Ken Ralphs, a former U.K. political campaigner who was also living rough near the holiday apartment in Praia da Luz that McCann disappeared from during a family vacation on May 3, 2007.
“We were sitting around the fire one night after a meal, we had a few beers and during the early hours of the morning my friend began to cry,” Ralphs told Sky News. “I asked him what the matter was and, eventually, he confessed to me he was getting involved with Christian to steal a child from Praia da Luz from a rich family.
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“I said you can’t get involved in kidnapping a person for ransom, that’s ridiculous, then he explained, ‘No, it’s not like that.’”
Ralphs, 58, says his friend, who was living a bohemian lifestyle in southwestern Portugal, told him that Brueckner had a buyer for the child lined up, a German couple who couldn’t have children.
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Ralphs says he returned to the U.K. and a week after the fireside conversation heard news reports that McCann had vanished from her family’s rented apartment in Praia da Luz.
He told Sky News that he drove to a police station in Workington, Cumbia, and reported what he was told, even going so far as to show the cops a “secret map” of the area where Brueckner could be found.
The allegation by Ralphs has been passed to German investigators by Hans Christian Wolters, the prosecutor leading the McCann investigation, Sky News reported.
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In 2020, Brueckner was publicly identified as the arguido (the main suspect) in McCann’s disappearance but he has not been charged and has denied any involvement. He is currently serving a seven-year sentence in a German prison for raping an elderly American woman in Praia da Luz.
Although it’s been years since Ralphs last saw Brueckner, who had left the area by the time the Brit returned to the Algarve, he identified the German man from photos shown him by Sky News.
“Of course, it’s definitely him,” he said. “I remember him clearly, he was good-looking, spoke very good English and was polite, though not particularly friendly. A bit of a loner.”
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