GROUND ZERO!

clothes in the lake.

“He drank a lot of beer as when I came down with him to pick up stones for a wall at my house there were loads of empty cans.

“I think he liked the silence and the fact there was usually noone else around. It now makes me horrified to think what he really might have done down there.”

Talking at her home near Silves, the expat, who has lived on the Algarve for three decades, added: “The most important thing detectives needed to know was exactly when and where he went by the lake. They made me pick it out on maps and aerial shots, which luckily I could do.” Located just 30 miles from where Madeleine, then 3, was snatched from her bed in Praia da Luz, Arade lake sits close to where Brueckner was staying at the time in the village of Foral.

A former flatmate, Michael Tatschl, told the Olive Press in 2020 that Brueckner ‘loved’ spending time by the lakes with his friend Christian Post, an IT technician, who now lives in Cambodia. “He loved the isolation at the lakes… and he was definitely a pervert and more than capable of snatching a child, for sexual kicks or money,” said Tatschl, from his home in Austria. “He was always bragging about making money. He even talked about selling kids maybe to Morocco, and I think he probably sold Maddie to someone –maybe a sex ring.”

When finally tracked down to Kampot, in Cambodia, last year, Post said he also believed Brueckner snatched a sleeping Madeleine while on a burglary spree. “Now I know about his paedophile past. I’m 100% cer- tain it was him. I think he found (Madeleine) by chance and took her,” said Post. This is a theory that German detectives have been working on since they unearthed a stash of 8000 photos and videos, including child abuse, at

a Brueckner property, in 2016

The files came with various other items, it can be revealed, some of which ‘directly implicate’ Brueckner in the abduction. Yet remarkably, while he was twice extradited from Portugal for sex crimes against children, Portuguese detectives never considered he could be involved.

He is currently serving a seven-year sentence for the rape of a 72-year-old in Praia da Luz, in 2005.

It was German cops who dis- covered his phone was used near Madeleine’s apartment on the same night she went missing.

Prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters told the Olive Press he is ‘certain’ Brueckner abducted Madeleine and killed her. Detectives have found at least one ‘relevant clue’ from the Arade search and taken dozens of samples back to Germany to be analysed over the coming weeks.

JADE Jagger is in the doghouse after being fined for resisting arrest, but could end up in the jailhouse if a police union lawyer has his way.

The 51-year-old daughter of Mick Jagger and his first (and legally speaking only) wife Bianca appeared at a fast-track hearing in an Ibiza court alongside her 31-year-old lover Anthony Hinkson.

Police were called to La Oliva restaurant in Ibiza’s Old Town when Hinkson was being abusive to staff and customers.

He refused to identify himself to officers and Jagger was reported to have intervened to ‘defend her partner’, and in doing so ‘assaulted’ and insulted a female officer. After two nights in the cells the pair appeared