EP06 - Madeleine McCann: The Chief Suspect

Donal and Jon Clarke expand upon a series of shocking sexual crimes that occurred in the area around Praia Da Luz which coincided with Christian Brueckner’s arrival in Portugal. Jon recounts a catalogue of failures and scandals that have surrounded the officers investigating Madeleine’s disappearance, culminating in the revelation that Brueckner may be linked to the tragic story of another missing young girl on the Algarve. 

Jon Clarke’s book, ‘My Search for Madeleine’ is available via the link below:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/MY-SEARCH-MADELEINE-Reporters-Harrowing-ebook/dp/B09F85HG7S

Transcript

Donal:             Let's pick up where we left off this is Christian Bruekner he is in Portugal. To recap for us if you could, he's now in front of this court in Lisbon a whole range of legal luminaries are there apparently to deal with a minor matter just explain the background to this really unusual confluence of a minor traffic offence and all these legal bigwigs in this one court room. 

01:08 --> 01:30

Jon:                 It's absolutely baffling why they would need to have for example, a professor linked in from a university in the north of Portugal, along with three or four other so-called witnesses to what is effectively a very small crime. This is supposedly, the insolence crime of not transferring his car from German to Portuguese plates. I mean I just don't believe it; it doesn't add up at all, it doesn't make sense.

01:31 --> 01:54

Donal:             Is there a sense that is a concern, that there are other darker forces operating behind trying to manage Brueckner and his previous crimes by keeping an eye on and monitoring this minor crime what do you think is going on here?

01:55 --> 02:06

 Jon:                 These minor crimes as they call them you cannot find out what these minor crimes were in 2008, it was only then that they finally made the watching and buying of child pornography illegal in Portugal.

02:07 --> 02:20

Donal:             In the background, it was accepted in his police file that he was being linked to a whole range of minor crimes, and the suggestion is because of the Portuguese law, at the time minor crimes could very easily have represented criminal offences in other jurisdictions 

01:54 --> 03:28

Jon:                 On record they know that this guy is involved in lots of things and what they're doing in this court case with so many people I just don't really understand, because of so many powers, strong powers, in Portugal that want this stuff covered up, and if you look at the Casa Pia case which eventually came to trial in 2009 and found thirty people guilty of child abuse in orphanages for many, many, years.  In 1981, the first police investigation was launched into rape of children in that children's home, 4600 children in orphanages around Portugal of which hundreds were raped. Now in 1981, they had a very in-depth investigation which got shelved, and it was another ten years before they start looking into again. So I'm wondering if the people involved in this court case in 2006, are just covering their backs and just making sure that they have the backing in that they're  working together because they are worried that they could be hung out to dry, and that could be pressure on them to get the wrong conviction, and they're not quite sure what do we do with this guy that's clearly well connected in with the various police forces in the courts. Would there be a possibility that he's actually a police informant in some way. 

03:28 --> 03:58

Donal:              I mean that's an interesting proposition because we all know people in the fringes or in the heart of the criminal communities, and we all know that those who live a slightly gilded life in terms of the criminal sentences, in terms of apprehensions, and time inside, often are police informants, and this affords them an opportunity to commit their crimes with a certain degree of impunity. So, is there a suggestion that we can really add merit to that Christian Bruekner may have been at some stage been a police informant?

03:59 --> 05:04

Jon:                 I think he's clearly known the local police force fairly well and, I think this is a suggestion that he might have turned turtle and, become state witness, had gone court witness. That court case is such an odd case. I'm wondering did he decide to come forward then and give names and evidence on other things and was it possible that he was squealing then at that case that we never found anything about. There's no real record about what it was about and what was said. Weirdly the translator a guy called, Uwe, I tracked him down to Praia da Luz no less, he lived Praia da Luz for many years, and I actually got a phone number for him eventually, and I called him up and I said: ‘Hi I notice that you were the official translator from this court case in 2006, involving Christian Brueckner.’ ‘...ooh what…’ very nervous… ‘…ooh…can’t talk about that, ‘it's a long time ago, but you know this guy is now accused of snatching Madeline McCann I mean this is err… surely you can give me a little bit of background even if off the record’ – ‘…ooh no not at all - I couldn’t possibly tell you anything.’ He was absolutely adamant that he couldn't say anything, he was quite clearly terrified that I’d got hold of him, he was very nervous, and the phone went down very quickly. 

05:04 --> 05:27

Donal:             So, we have the possibility that he may have been a police informant in Portugal. At the same time, we know that during his time in Praia da Luz there’s a whole range of sex offences which were reported by expats and by tourists but appeared to have been either investigated only to a slight degree, or swept under the carpet ostensibly one might think because of fears of damage to the tourism industry 

05:04 --> 05:57

Jon:                 It's actually quite remarkable how much crime was happening in such a small tourist resort like Praia da Luz and the nearby villages of Cavallaro and Lagos.  We only really discover the depth and detail, and the amount of crime when operation Grange starts to look into this. As we go into sort of 2009, 2010, they start speaking to British families who’ve cut… they appeal for people to come forward who may have seen, or heard, or had any sort of problems while they were on holiday in Praia da Luz. 

05:58 --> 06:04

Donal:             Jon, just for those who are fresh to the case could you remind the audience what operation Grange is and was.

06:05 --> 07:16

Jon:                 Operation Grange was set up out of London by the Metropolitan Police by Scotland yard and it was at the appeal of the McCanns, who felt after they were first accused of killing their daughter and then were let off, they felt that there was no real investigation going on in Portugal, and they were obviously very concerned that there was no way anyone was going to find their daughter. So, there was a very big appeal globally which as you may know, the audience may know went up to number 10 Downing Street even and got such pressure that it was decided that the British police should step in and start a separate investigation into the McCann case. So eventually Operation Grange was launched to really have a forensic look at all the evidence that had been before and to have a proper cold case review of the McCann case and that's really started and took 18 months to two years before they really announced what they were finding, and there was simply staggering the amounts of information they um… they uncovered and the sort of alarming detail that we all fear as British holiday makers abroad that came to pass. Not only did the Portuguese police come out very badly from that, but also the fact that there was such an alarming amount of ne’er-do-wells and convicts and criminals living in these areas, living in this particular area.

07:18 --> 07:31

Donal:              So, operation Grange, I would say the much-derided Operation Grange did to its credit shine a light on the multiplicity of sexual and historical sex crimes, and attacks, and burglaries, in and around the small town of Praia da Luz. 

07:32 --> 09:15

Jon:                 Collating information that they had on the ground in Portugal, plus appeals to the public in the UK and Europe, they established that between 2004 and 2007 there’d been thirty sex attacks on children in an area fifty-mile radius, sixty-five-kilometre radius of Praia da Luz.  They also interviewed British families and they discovered that eighteen British families had children who had been abused in their houses late at night while they were on holiday in apartments in this area, a lot of them had reported this to the police. I discovered that on most occasions none of these reports were properly investigated, almost none of them. And one case, one famous case, an eight-year-old and an eleven-year-old girl was sleeping in their parents’ apartment with the parents sleeping next door. Someone sneaked through the door slid open the patio door of their apartment, rather like the McCanns 5A apartment, climbed into bed with the eight-year-old girl, wearing a surgical mask, got into bed started abusing the girl. This girl woke up and said, ‘is that you daddy?’ and heard nothing, and then because an uncle, who was also staying on holiday said, ‘is that you uncle?’ It was at that point that the older sister woke up looked across the beds, twin bed and saw this weirdo lying in bed with the daughter with a surgical mask on, but she woke up and started getting worried and the guy realising that he’d woken the daughter up, got up carefully. Actually, he had wrapped some laundry around his shoes so that he could quietly slip out, and he walked away very carefully, shut the door, slid the patio door shut, and vanished. Then they woke their parents up and told them what happened, they couldn't believe it. In this case I don't think the police did fingerprinting on the patio doors or anything and that that's how serious this is that's one step before you snatch a child right?

09:16 --> 09:23

Donal:             Explain to us the role of the police in this, you allude to the fact that even in that very serious case the police appeared to not even do the basics.

09:24 --> 10:50

Jon:                 I mean there’s two cases really that we should talk about. The first one really err… is … just sums up the lackadaisical approach of the police there.  There's a German family on holiday, this is exactly one month before Madeleine McCann goes missing. And they're on a beach about five miles up the coast and they've got two children, and they're playing on the edge of a beach, kind of deserted beach that I visited actually, had a look around and is rather a beautiful area. The daughter goes around the rock, and they’re sort of playing in a rock pool while their parents are sunbathing reading books about twenty metres away, she’s sitting there. Suddenly out of nowhere arrives a naked German man. Now I say he’s German because he actually initially spoke to her in English but realising that she was German started talking to her in German. Now, this guy was naked, and he had a backpack on his back, a small backpack. This guy grabs the girl, starts playing with himself as he’s groping her, the girl screams, her brother who’s very nearby comes down sees the guy runs… screams as well, runs back to family the parents jump up come running round, this guy obviously realising he’s been rumbled, is climbing up the cliffs to get away from the beach. Now he’s climbing up quite…not really steep, you know, pretty steep slope up the hill and he gets away. The parents have a really good look at this guy they see he’s a fairly gormless looking bloke, strange teeth, they see his height, type of hair, and really this broad daylight so they've had a really good at him, he runs over the top. 

10:50 --> 12:14

Now, interestingly I followed this track I discovered that this track headland, goes over a headlands and about five, six minutes scramble away, comes to another beach where there's a big car park where there's about, even today, there’s about ten or twelve van lifers parked up living but back then apparently the car park wasn’t properly there, it was dusty, and there were twenty to thirty of  these so called van lifers living there, hanging out there. Now, I believe this is one of the places to find, I know that it’s one of the places that Brueckner regularly parked his van and slept, and you know washed in the facilities there, and went into the sea and these sort of hippies lived and hung out. This family the last day of their holiday, went out of their way to drive to a police station and it covered this area called Bispo went into the police station and filed a very detailed report, perfect description of the guy, the size, how he spoke, his accent, and his nationality was German, and they went home back to Germany. Saturday morning, the next day, the inspector came in looked at the case, scanned it for a few minutes, and then just said right fine case closed. Didn't even go in his car, didn't even drive down to the beach, didn't even drive down to the next path where they could just have turned up where there were twenty thirty vans parked up. He could have very easily of said, ‘anyone here seen a German guy about this size, blonde hair, you know who may have been involved in something that the day before, a few days before. No didn't even leave his office, didn’t go out that file went no further.

12:14 --> 12:14

Donal:             And why do you think that was? I’d imagine most police officers would be rather keen to catch sex offenders like that.

12:15 --> 12:38

Jon:                 I don't know, is he just one of the bad cops because let's assume that 10% of cops are bad, is he just one of those bad cops. Either he knows the guy who would have done it and he's been paid off, he's told not to investigate this crime, he doesn't see it as a crime, or were there so many of these kinds of cases they were swamped, and they just didn't have time, we can only speculate.

12:15 --> 12:38

Donal:             What other indications did you have that the police investigating sex crimes in that part of Portugal simply was not up to muster. 

12:39 --> 13:37

Jon:                The other case that I really want to talk about is the case of Hazel Behan which is a few years earlier in 2004. She’s working, she's a very attractive Irish girl, she's… in fact, she's turned twenty and she’s working in Portimao, she’s got an apartment a first-floor apartment block paid for by the company she's working for. She had a sense or strange feeling that someone had been in her apartment, couldn't quite work out why but she felt things had moved around found the toilet seat being put up or down, and she had a sense that someone had been in her apartment. The next day she's going to bed in creeps a guy, blond-haired blue-eyed man, who matches the description perfectly of Christian Brueckner who she believes is Christian Brueckner by the way. Came in and very, very, savagely ties her up, rapes her very badly and most importantly films it.

12:39 --> 13:37

Donal:             So, Jon, horrific crime she identifies him as Brueckner now what was the police response to that horrific crime?

13:38 --> 15:04

Jon:                 It's alarming on lots of levels Donal, she's very badly attacked, and this attack is filmed. The police she eventually gets out, the police are called this is about one, two, in the morning. Apparently twenty police come charging down to her apartment, she's made to strip down naked in front of, by all accounts dozens of these men, she says it was all of them, so potentially up to twenty men, while a police photographer takes pictures of her and she's in her own words ‘humiliated,’ It’s not only bad enough what's happened she’s then humiliated by this police force that stands there pictures her and looks around the apartment. Clearly didn't look around the apartment that well because when her mother arrived two days later to go back with her to the apartment to get her things, they find one of her nails on the bed and wrapped up in the bedding so clearly the police rocked up twenty of them, but they clearly hadn't cleared the apartment of all the, even all the evidence. After they filed the report and she's gone down to the police station a few days later with the mother, they said to her, ‘Look you know, do you want to press charges is there any, any, point here. Are we ever going to find this guy it’s during a European Championship football tournament there’s so many foreigners around at the moment? This could be anyone it’s almost certainly going to be a tourist who’s here on holiday. It's not going to be good for the tourist industry, you know don't you think we should just keep this quiet?’ You know what she was twenty years old, a bit naïve, she agreed, she said, ‘yeah okay fair enough.’ and the case got dropped.

15:04 --> 15:08

Donal:             Just remind me of the year and the location of that attack?

15:09 --> 15:12

Jon:                 Summer of 2004. It's in Portimao, which is about twenty minutes from Praia da Luz something like that.

15:13 --> 15:23

Donal:             There were other attacks equally horrific that went unprosecuted and provoked a very poor response from the local police in the area.

15:24 --> 16:45

Jon:                 The most obvious is the one that Christian Brueckner’s currently imprisoned for. He's in prison luckily on many levels, in prison for seven years for the very violent vicious rape and attack on a seventy-two-year-old American woman, for which he is only been found now by German police in German courts. There was lots of evidence at the time to suggest that he might have been involved. The police didn't do much really in Portugal to try and catch this guy, this poor woman really did her best to try and catch the guy and find him guilty but there was no way that Portuguese police were going to find that…find him guilty. What we do know is that in September 2005 Christian Brueckner was living in Praia da Luz and just as the crow flies almost as near as the Ocean Club is the house Casa Jacaranda of Diana Menkes.  Diana Menkes is a very bright wonderful woman who went to Princeton university, got a great degree, worked in journalism interestingly, and travelled the world with her husband who actually was a rocket scientist, no less. They ended up sort of retiring in Portugal in Praia da Luz in a beautiful house right by the sea. And that house had a track next to it that went up the hill towards Christian Brueckner’s yellow house.

16:45 --> 17:35

After this horrible attack took place in which a video camera was set up and the whole thing was filmed, and various things were taken, including a hair of the attacker which was put into a box along with other evidence and basically went nowhere. In Portuguese law bizarrely, a case like this even though a very serious attack, violent rape like this, that evidence could have been or should have been chucked out five years later but by amazing fortune it wasn't. So, when the German police contacted Portuguese police in 2018, and said look we would like to relook into this case of this woman who was attacked in Praia da Luz, a couple of years before Madeleine McCann went missing, could you send us any evidence or information you got. The police by amazing fortune had a box somewhere of this evidence which included a hair, at this point they had Christian Brueckner’s DNA. So, they had the hair, and everything sent over to their labs in Germany incredibly they got DNA match.

17:35 --> 17:44

Donal:             And as a consequence of that, bring me through the trauma of Diana Menkes giving evidence, I think you spoke to her family had become well aware of the case.

17:44 --> 18:24

Jon:                 Diana Menkes a remarkable woman who after this horrific case, you can imagine, she didn't really want to stay in Portugal, her husband had died a few years earlier. She had loved the Algarve had loved Praia Da Luz, she ended up moving back to America and sadly died, recently. Fortunately, before she died the German police contacted her out the blue in 2018 and asked her would you be prepared to um… give evidence against your attacker, and she of course, said yes, and she was able to. There was a video link to the courts in Germany they asked her all about the case and what she remembered, and she was able to give a very good description of what happened and who the attacker was, and it was deemed more than enough to convict Christian Brueckner. 

18:24 --> 18:51

Donal:             This is a serious sex offender, any age, anytime, opportunistic, dangerous, added to that is the suggestion he may have been a police informer, and that his sex crimes in Portugal in the years before Maddy McCann seemingly went uninvestigated there. Think it's worthwhile turning the spotlight on the individual officers who investigated the Maddie McCann case, and where they are now as a measure of perhaps their competence and integrity.

18:51 --> 20:48

Jon:                 The heads of the department back in the early 2000s are worth shining a light on and in particular, we should look at Goncalo Amaral and we should look at Paulo Pereira.  Goncalo Amaral was unbeknown to most people the day before Madeleine McCann went missing, was made a suspect in the case of another missing girl just a few years earlier just outside Praia da Luz. He was accused, because they never had any other evidence, of covering up and perjury on behalf of his officers who had and had later proven beaten the confession out of a mother who supposedly had killed her own daughter, this girl Joanna. Now, Leonor was eventually found guilty of killing her but was eventually… the conviction was quashed, and she was allowed out of prison and the judge said he was absolutely certain that she didn't do it.  Amaral was leading the group of detectives investigating that case. Another missing girl let's not forget, seven miles in a little village called Figueiras, seven miles from Praia da Luz very close, and you have a police force that exactly two months after she goes missing charged the mother with murder. The mother and the uncle just two months, look at the similarities here, just two months after the girl Joanna goes missing the mother and uncle get charged with her murder despite the fact that been no body, no evidence, no actual narrative to suggest that there’s any truth to it all. Though they had suggested that the girl had gone out at eight o'clock in the evening to pick up some stuff from the corner shop for her mother, came back home and discovered her mother in bed with her uncle and was so horrified supposedly, that she screamed and at this point the mother and the uncle killed her so just think about it. So, the girl comes back home, just suppose she does find her mother in bed with her uncle is that going to be so awful that she screams and it’s going to be such a bad crime that the parents would then kill her because they'd seen it. Now, I don't know whether this girl who went missing, who’s vanished, and still not been found could be connected to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

20:49 --> 21:28

Donal:             Clearly, we see the footprint towards the continuing narrative, and suspicion, and overarching suspicion in and around parents. Now, we get it when there's a missing kid when there's crimes against children those in the immediate vicinity, close family and friends are immediately suspects, and I think the McCanns, and everybody understands that the process you have to go through, but perhaps their fixation on the McCann's owes a little bit of the heritage to the case of Joanne. I met Goncalo Amaral myself when I was doing some work on the case. I met him in Spain he couldn't speak in Portugal, he was under prohibition and if I remember correctly, despite the way he acted and how he performed his job he did have a law degree and should have had a better skill set than most.

21:29 --> 22:33

Jon:                 Now, I can tell you a little bit about that law degree it's interesting. I discovered recently, he got the law degree after he’d left the police force and actually, weirdly, he  got the law degree at the help of the lawyer who represented the family of Joanna in the missing persons case, and the lawyer who by the way, told me that not only was he convinced the family weren't involved but that Leonor was not guilty of killing her daughter but that Christian Brueckner himself, may well have been linked into that case. Now he told me that he trained, and helped, and sponsored Goncalo Amaral, to do law after he left the police force, but I think we must remember that the most important thing here is to…. is to… remember, that this man, this senior police chief, was convicted, found guilty, and given an eighteen month sentence for covering up and perjury in the case of missing Joanna. He covered up in beating the confession out of a poor woman who obviously not just missing her own daughter devastated by that, is then found guilty and put in prison for killing her daughter, wrongly convicted.  This is the chief of police that investigated the Madeleine McCann case.

22:34 --> 22:42

Donal:             Turning to his deputy Paulo Pereira. What do we know about Paulo Pereira and what's happened to him since he stopped investigating the Madeleine McCann case?

22:43 --> 24:21

Jon:                 Paulo Pereira really is just larger than life Donal, and he's someone that we must be very careful talking about, you don't want him to know where you live. This man was deputy to Goncalo Amaral at the time that Joanna went missing, we should stress here that he left the force in 2007 and he wasn't really involved in the investigation of Madeleine McCann. Although I'm not so sure because he had a setup, a so-called detective agency not long after then, and I don't know if he was working privately or if he was still linked to the force. One thing we do know about him is he's spoken a lot about the McCann case. He’s always accused the McCanns of killing their daughter, and he's been all over most documentaries badmouthing the McCanns, the British detectives, the British police. Anyone who suspects that child molesters snatched Madeline he always pours cold water over that. When he left the police force in 2007, what did he do Donal? He became the President of Portugal's Association of Missing Children, stop for a second and think about that.  This is a guy that's linked in and had been involved in a case of a missing girl, he speaks a lot about the case of Madeleine McCann, and now he's the President of this Association, by the way what is he doing in that year that he's the President, not very much but I did find anything he had done in that year all he did was say that there is no problem with child pornography in Portugal, there's no problem with paedophilia in Portugal. In fact, Spain had a far bigger problem, England had a far, far, bigger problem it was taken out of all proportion that Portugal had a child sex abuse paedophilia problem. In fact, he said there was no problem we need to look into a few missing children, there’s only…there’s five missing children in Portugal and we will continue to look into that, but we think things are okay.

24:21 --> 24:24

Donal:             So, what happened compiler Paulo Pereira after his role in that charity?

24:24 --> 26:02

Jon:                 Well okay after it’s a quango really, set up by the State with presumably quite a high salary. I would say it's a very political appointment, wouldn’t you? Based out of Lisbon linked into lots of the bigwigs and politicians but I don't know what he did exactly there, but after that he becomes the President of Sporting Lisbon, of course, one of Portugal’s, or Europe’s most famous football teams. In fact, the oldest football team in Portugal he's there for three or four years during which he’s always in the news for controversy for being involved in all sorts of dodgy stuff. He's eventually convicted of embezzlement of funds from Sporting Lisbon and is given a four-and-a-half-year sentence which don't ask me why it gets suspended, and he of course loses that job. Next thing we hear about Paulo Pereira is a couple of years ago he's linked into a crime gang that's involved in breaking into multi-million-pound homes in Lisbon and Sintra, and even involved in kidnapping key figures, wealthy figures, to extort money from them. In these cases, there are policemen, fake policeman, dressed up with fake police badges, those people involved in the arrests in this gang involve actual police officers, above all of them who is puppet master? Mr Pereira is seen as the man orchestrating and coordinating this entire case. Mr Pereira who is now in prison thankfully, for seven years. He's appealed it, this happened very recently Donal, about a month ago, and he lost his appeal. So, he's staying in prison for that very serious offence of kidnapping and breaking into homes. 

26:03 --> 26:28

Donal:             I mean it’s quite extraordinary that  two key characters and I suppose is a fair point to make, that if these two senior characters in the local PJ, the Portuguese police, if this represents the quality and integrity of the force there, obviously it doesn't represent every officer but then it obviously raises significant question marks, it might explain why the original investigation has rightly been so derided as incompetent and not up to scratch.

26:29 --> 26:34

Jon:                 It’s fair say that we weren’t dealt the best quality police that Portugal has, to investigate the McCann affair.

26:35 --> 26:55

Donal:             Emerging as we are toward the date when Madeline McCann in 2007 went missing, we've got a pretty messy landscape here, something which doesn't offer much hope to those whose children have been lost or involved in sex offences. The cops aren’t up to scratch and there's a murkiness around one singular sex offender who knows the area very well.

26:56 --> 27:50

Jon:                 I should probably leave it to Kate McCann herself to sum up what was going on. She wrote in her book that she was reading night after night, about strange sick people creeping into apartments and abusing, molesting, children, and this paedophile and that paedophile and these people here, there, and everywhere. She just couldn't believe the place that they'd ended up in, that this awful horrific scenario they were in, was really actually no real surprise, because it happened many times before, and it was just nothing short of a miracle that no other children had been snatched from those apartments. But two years earlier a girl had been, vanished, snatched we assume by potentially the same person, by potentially the same gang, and that is where I think the German police are really delving deeply into the sort of strata of society, and the bizarre society that existed in 2007, on the Algarve. 

27:50 --> 27:52

Donal:             I think uniquely, that you're also linking Christian Brueckner to the case of Joanne.

27:53 --> 29:21

Jon:                 I am, I've actually discovered that in the weeks leading up to Joanna’s disappearance. There was supposedly a white van parked up near the village with a rather strange looking northern European, sort of hippy guy living in a van in the area. Now, this was looked into a little at the time but as you know now, they don't really investigate these cases very deeply and there wasn't a great deal of investigation that went on. Bear in mind that the poor mother of the girl was in custody along with her uncle, there was not a whole lot of people really looking into what happened in this village at the time. Well, I started looking into it, I went to the village and asked around and there's not many people who remember really back then and what happened, and particularly because the family were seen to be quite sort of simple and they have now moved on. In fact, since she got out of prison, she's moved to totally different part of Portugal and her uncles no longer around.  But, I spoke to the family lawyer and it's very interesting the family lawyer, this is the same lawyer bizarrely, who trained Amaral to be a lawyer, he said ‘yes’ he said ‘we did work out that the van in this village was, in fact, traced to Praia da Luz and was, in fact, Christian Brueckner’s van,’ I’m like really, you’re kidding me, I just couldn’t believe it when he told me this.  I said can you repeat that? ‘Yeah, we believe it was Christian Brueckner’s van, it was parked back at his house in Praia da Luz. He says yeah, it doesn't prove anything, doesn't mean anything, just because his van was seen in this village of Figueres doesn't mean that he snatched Joanna. I said, ‘correct I'm not suggesting that he did but it's a very interesting coincidence, isn't it?’ 

29:22 --> 29:27

Donal:             A person of interest at the very least. Jon, many thanks we’ll pick up all these other threads in the next episode.

29:28 --> 29:29

Jon:                 Thank you Donal, thank you very much.