Many of the items were recovered by the police investigating her disappearance. Madeline McCannduring a search operation last week (24-30/6) at a dam in Portugal.

A report from the Braunschweig Public Prosecutor’s Office on Thursday (January 6) states:

“The search operation carried out last week in the area of ​​the Arad reservoir in Portugal was completed on Thursday (1/6) three days later, as planned. A predetermined area along the reservoir was carefully surveyed for potential evidence. A number of items were seized as part of the operation and will be assessed in the coming days and weeks. It is not yet possible to say whether some of the items are really relevant.”

At the end of May, the Portuguese police carried out three-day searches near a reservoir in Silves, a village in the Algarve tourist region (southern Portugal) at the request of the German authorities.

Last year, Portugal’s interior ministry announced that, at its request, the suspect had been prosecuted in Germany as part of an investigation carried out in cooperation with the German and British authorities. According to German justice, this is Christian Brickner, known to the authorities as a pedophile, who lived for many years in southern Portugal.

This man, already serving a prison sentence for the rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Portugal in 2005, has been considered as the main suspect in the murder of little Madeleine since 2020. The Portuguese magazine Expresso reported that Brickner went to the Arante Dam, which is very close to the community of Silves.

Madeleine, who was about 3 years old at the time, disappeared from her hotel room in Praia da Luz, an Algarve resort, on May 3, 2007, while her parents were having dinner with friends at a nearby restaurant. The Portuguese police closed the case in 2008, after 14 months of investigation and after the child’s parents were previously prosecuted, who were later cleared of all charges.