NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN photos of Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brueckner have emerged just days before his multiple sex crimes trial in Germany.
The images give a rare glimpse into the 47-year-old paedophile’s private life and inner circle.
They were taken at his own 37th birthday party at a rented kiosk he called home for four years – and just weeks after he was first questioned over his links to Maddie in November 2013.
One photo shows him dressed in a striped tie and white shirt as he stands next to a spread of Iberian-inspired food – including Spanish tortilla.
“It didn’t matter that we knew he was linked to the Maddie case and other dodgy stuff, he was always the life of the party,’ a friend told the Olive Press this week.
“He would get everyone drunk with free booze, stuff like Jaegermaster, and we would end up partying till 2 or 3am.”
The friend, who often worked at the kiosk when Christian was away, continued: “His birthday was a great night, with about 15 to 20 people, his landlord and his wife, his girlfriend, Nakscije, of course, and some Turkish ladies.
“The food was bought by me and Francesco, a Spanish guy from the Canaries, who has lived here for 15 years and makes the best Spanish tortillas.
“We got there at about 4pm and started to prepare the dishes and people started arriving, I guess, an hour or so later.
“It ended up being a really long, fun night, one of many we had with Christian there.”
The party was one of many that took place at his rented kiosk, his last registered address, on the Altstadtring inner ring road of the German town of Braunschweig.
He had rented the scruffy ground floor kiosk and apartment, owned by a German businessman Dieter Klein, in December 2012, having fled back to Germany in 2008, a year after Madeleine, 3, had vanished from her holiday home in Praia da Luz, on the Algarve.
Sublet from a Turkish businessman, called Norbert, he quickly went about turning it into a popular bar, which became the ‘party nerve centre’ for a big section of the city’s demi-monde.
Comprising a bar/kiosk downstairs and an apartment next door, it functioned as a shop and off licence by day and a bar at night.
“This was the problem,” recalled the friend. “Because lots of young children, maybe 20, 30, 40 a day, would come in for sweets and lollipops and Christian was always giving them little presents and extra sweets.
“There was a school just around the corner and when I started working there, another worker told me to be careful to never let any of the young girls go to the toilet or into Christian’s apartment next door.
“We all started to have suspicions about Christian, but when police visited with a summons connecting him to the disappearance of Maddie we really started to suspect him.”
Indeed, it was on November 4, 2013, that two local officers came round with a letter, which ordered Brueckner to appear at a local police station two days later to answer questions ‘relating to the crime scene of missing Madeleine McCann (in Portugal)’.
Headed ‘Summons as a witness’, it addressed him as ‘Herr Christian Stefan Brueckner’ and added that this was a ‘preliminary investigation’. and he would be required to ‘give his exact movements and timings from midnight on May, 2007 until midnight on May 31, 2007.’
It added he would ‘need to advise them’ if he was unable to attend.
His friend, who has insisted on remaining anonymous, was there at the time in the back room of the kiosk and watched the police hand him the letter.
“I remember it well. We watched it on the CCTV from the back room, and saw these two officers hand him the letter,” he recalled.
“He came back and started waving it around like it was a joke. He was laughing and joking, saying: ‘Look, they want to involve me now in the Madeleine McCann case, just because I lived in Portugal at the time’, then adding, laughing: ‘Little do they know that Maddie is in the basement’.”
He continued that they made jokes about it for the next ‘three to four weeks’ and Christian boasted that he had gone to answer the questions and easily ‘swatted them away’.
READ MORE: Army of witnesses to testify against Christian Brueckner at his multiple sex crimes trial
“If he was involved he certainly didn’t come over as stressed about it. But maybe he was just a really good actor,” added the friend.
“I also don’t know if over those two days he was given he went off to hide evidence. He was certainly given enough time to prepare some answers.”
But over the next year there were plenty of clues that Brueckner – who is currently serving a seven year prison sentence for the sadistic rape of a pensioner, 72 – was involved in serious sex crimes.
Aside from the lewd, appalling treatment of his on/off girlfriend Nakscije – who he would often sexually assault and beat up in front of his friends – he was also accused by another girlfriend of abusing her daughter.
It was here, at the kiosk, that police had raided on February 7, 2014 to find two cameras with child pornography on them, some linked to the five-year-old daughter of his girlfriend Anja P.
In the case that went to trial in Braunschweig in 2016, prosecutors revealed that one Casio Exilim camera had 391 child porn photos on it.
Among these were a series of photos Brueckner had taken of Anja’s daughter on a trip to a local park in Braunschweig on June 6, 2013.
He had taken dozens of pictures of the little girl and saved them, like a trophy, on his camera with the intent to ‘later arouse himself sexually’ prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters explained to the Sun.
“There was no doubt the camera belonged to him,” he revealed. “There is one pic of him looking up a slide from below with his erect penis in the foreground.
“He also took pictures of her sitting on the grass with her legs spread wide, while he pushes her knickers to the side and touches her vagina.”
During the trial, Anja P claimed he had assaulted her daughter on ‘at least three occasions’ and revealed he was an ‘extremely possessive and violent man’ and regularly hit her when drunk.
It should be no surprise then that he should also be arrested and charged over a savage attack on another girlfriend, believed to be Nakscije, at a bus stop in Braunschweig in November 2015.
And indeed his charge sheet, which the Sun has seen, shows around 20 separate prosecutions, which started when he was a teenager.
And, this week, on Friday, in a case scheduled to run for over three months at Braunschweig’s Regional Court, he faces yet five more charges of child abuse and rape.
It includes two sexual assaults on children in Portugal, one on a beach near Praia da Luz, just a month before Maddie went missing in May 2007, as well as three rapes.
One of those involved the filmed four-hour attack on Irish youngster Hazel Behan, also on the Algarve, as well as the rape of a teenager, 14, and a separate attack on a pensioner between 70 and 80 years old. Both were filmed.
