The private investigator hired by the McCanns to find missing Madeleine has issued a harrowing update on what could have happened to her when she vanished nearly 20 years ago. Julian Peribañez has no intention of giving up the search for Maddie, and revealed his own theories about what happened to the little girl. He told the Olive Press: “I don’t know if she’s alive or not, because hardly anyone on Earth does. But as long as I have hope, I won’t stop looking.”
Mr Peribañez has continued to pursue his own lines of inquiry and believes that Maddie was kidnapped by an Eastern European trafficking gang.
He urged anyone in the Algarve region with information to come forward. He said: “If you’ve had encounters with people who fit the profile, please reach out. All I need is a name. Give me a name, and I’ll chase it wherever I have to.”
Her parents, Kate and Gerry, had left Madeleine and her younger twin siblings sleeping while they dined at a tapas restaurant roughly 55 metres away, taking turns to check on them throughout the night.
At around 10pm, Kate discovered Madeleine’s bed empty and the bedroom window open, triggering an international search effort that quickly grew into one of the most high-profile, complex, and protracted police inquiries in modern history.
The multi-agency investigation has seen thousands of leads pursued across Europe – including Scotland Yard’s Operation Grange – yet the case remains formally unsolved.
However, no murder charges have been brought against him regarding her disappearance, and the case has repeatedly stalled amid complex legal battles and separate criminal trials.
Brueckner had been accused of committing five offences in Portugal between December 2000 and June 2017. However, the appeal is only being made against four charges.
One of the most shocking allegations concerned the rape of an elderly woman, which prosecutors claimed had been filmed. But judges ruled that the witnesses’ descriptions of the alleged video were insufficient to establish what had happened.
