The woman at the centre of a police investigation into whether Madeleine McCann was killed in a hit-and-run accident said she had no idea officers were interested in her. The anonymous German citizen became the focus of police enquiries seven years ago when it was speculated that the three-year-old had left the Portuguese holiday resort where she was staying through an unlocked patio door, before being killed in a traffic collision. The hit-and-run theory, which runs counter to the general assumption that Madeleine was kidnapped from her bedroom while her parents were having dinner with friends nearby, was leaked to Portugal’s Correio da Manha newspaper in June.
The theory had been taken seriously by Portuguese and British police, the report suggests, but eventually fizzled out because German authorities refused to co-operate and send an undercover detective to befriend its main suspect. The German woman in question had been working at a restaurant near the Praia da Luz resort in May 2007, when Madeleine disappeared, and her British partner was a chef at the Ocean Club who served dinner to Kate and Gerry McCann on the night that the three-year-old went missing.
She said the flat she shared with her partner was searched by police, alongside that of many nearby residents, but insisted she never realised the extent of police scrutiny on her involvement.
Such speculation pre-dated the identification of convicted sex offender Christian Brueckner as the prime suspect in Madeleine’s disappearance. He will be released from a German jail within the next week following a seven-year-sentence for raping an elderly woman in Praia da Luz in 2005.
“I don’t even know if there was a car accident, because I was working,” the German woman told Sky News. “I came home at half 10, and my boyfriend was home already.”
She said she became frustrated when police returned to scour her flat a second time and reportedly asked her to empty her freezer. “Do you think I’ve cut her up in little pieces and I’m going to have her for dinner?” she asked.
She was also contacted by German police around a decade later, but only to ask whether she knew Brueckner or had seen him hanging around the holiday resort.
“They wanted to know if I ever saw this German bloke around this area where I was living for a long time,” she said. “Other people obviously saw his van, but I never saw it.”
The woman also said German police had called her several times over a year, and the family of her partner, who has since died, said he had been questioned by Scotland Yard detectives.
Evidence used to support the hit-and-run theory included the revelation that Madeleine had woken up crying the night before she vanished and, the next day, asked her parents where they had been.
However, her mother Kate dismissed the idea that the three-year-old had managed to leave the apartment alone in her 2011 book, titled Madeleine.
“To give any credence whatsoever to the idea Madeleine could have walked out on her own, you would have to accept that she had gone out the back way, pulling aside the sitting room curtains and drawing them again, then opening the patio door, the child safety gate at the top of the stairs on the veranda and the little gate to the road – and carefully closing all three behind her,” Kate wrote. “What three-year-old do you know who would do that?”