EP07 - Madeleine McCann: The Chief Suspect

Jon Clarke recalls his journey on the trail of Christian Brueckner across the Algarve, during lockdown, in June 2020. Donal sifts through the details as Jon tracks Brueckner to a house in a crime-ridden village and uncovers a shocking revelation during an exclusive and candid interview with a close contact. 

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:              John, bring us to this summer of June 2020, where are we in the story, we know we're in lockdown where are we in terms of our hunt to find out as much information as we can about Christian Brueckner? 

00:35 --> 02:04

Jon:                 Well Donal yeah it was exactly then in 2020 that the police announced they were looking for a certain Christian B, who could have been involved in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. They suddenly after, you know, fifteen years or fourteen years or however long it was, suddenly they've got someone concrete and it's not coming from England it's coming from Germany. I was stuck here in Spain, and it was lockdown and I mean it was total lockdown and you couldn't travel unless you had very specific permission, you couldn't go anywhere. The first thing I did was contact the news editor at The Mail on Sunday and said, look I'm assuming you want someone over there and he was like yeah, we are going to try and send from the UK, but could you get over there? Right well obviously, you know, I’ll try hard to try and get there. On two counts it’s difficult, one that I’m not even really meant to be travelling, two the border is actually shut, believe it or not between Portugal and Spain which is only the fourth time in history, thirdly, I haven't got a passport because my passport had been sent back to England to be renewed, and because it was lockdown and COVID it was taking about three months and it still hasn't come back. 

02:04 --> 02:53

I did have a photocopy of my old one fortunately, I contacted Laurence my digital editor and said, right Laurence, I'm picking you up in Seville and we're going to Portugal. He said, there’s no way I can go I'm not allowed out the house. Laurence you're working for the Olive Press mate you’re a journalist, we’ll get you a letter from the Olive Press, we’ll get a letter from the Mail on Sunday as well, we can cross this border. Sure, enough we got the letter from our newspaper here and we got two letters from the Mail on Sunday saying we were working for them, and we actually needed them. I mean, they stopped us on the border I’m not joking we got to the border, there was nothing, not one car. I mean, this is the main border the crossing on the Algarve onto the Costa de la Luz the main crossing into Spain and there was nobody there, there were just about 20 police. So, we had to kind of get our press passes out, we got letters out and they kept us for a full hour, you know, on the border it was touch and go.

02:53 --> 03:13

Donal:              What was interesting about this intervention by the German police was that one it was a state intervention, two it was a very secure source. Throughout the whole Madeline investigation there’s been sources, hints, suggestions, hints of new enquiries, but here was something on the record and secure, a major police force outside of England outside of Portugal saying they had a potential breakthrough in the case.

03:14 --> 04:19

Jon:                 And of course, the BKA are taken very seriously and they’re one of the top forces in Europe and obviously a very serious operation. So, there was nobody in the kind of Maddy world if you like, who wouldn't have taken this very seriously. And, in fact, it was good to see that operation Grange within an hour of this going out, also called a press conference in London and it also backed up the German findings and were also giving more information on it. What they were announcing was that they were, in particular, looking for two phone numbers that had been used on the night say between 7:30 and 8:00 o'clock, a half hour phone call in particular, between two phone numbers and they were appealing for information on who had those two phone numbers. And, of course, they were also asking for information on two properties that were near Praia da Luz, in particular the yellow house and the old schoolhouse, and they were also looking for information on two vehicles, one the Jaguar the dark Jaguar XJS and the other one being this sort of yellow and white VW van. There was a lot of stuff for us journalists to kind of get our teeth into, it was very clear there were two places to go, one was Germany, and one was Portugal 

04:20 --> 04:30

Donal:             You're on this personal crusade to track down information about Christian Brueckner and, of course, you are now part of a press pack energised by as all journalists are trying to be first to the scoop.

04:31 --> 05:56

Jon:                 I think Donal, what is interesting is, you’ve got to remember that I'm running a business here. So, I kind of moved up from being just a reporter to being an editor of a newspaper, and then really a publisher of a newspaper group, and I don't want it to sound amazing like I'm some sort of Rupert Murdoch character I’m not. But this one is close to my heart I've done a lot on it, and I've done the Netflix documentary don't forget two years before, that had only relatively recently come out.  I bought into this case, so I wanted to do this, and I needed to be there. We got into the ballpark as quickly as possible, and I reckon I mean it was a hella of thing getting across the border. We would have been there easily first, had it not been for all these mishaps, but we did get there pretty much before anyone else. We kind of got there and we started asking around questions as it was pretty much dark and everyone, the first thing everyone said is, oh no, the parents killed her. I’m like you are joking have you seen the news, yeah, we still don’t believe it, come off it guys I mean for God's sake, it’s come from the German police, it’s come from the British police, you're still now saying that the McCanns, did it? Yeah, well pretty much yeah, but, hey, we were there in the right place Praia da Luz. And the next morning we got up nice and early and we went to look for this so-called yellow house and, in fact, the Mail on Sunday is a great paper I mean they’re so organised and they had a whole team of about six people on this, and James Miller who is running the show had got a memo overnight, a detailed memo with about fifteen points that we had to do and things we had to check. One of them was to find the yellow house and we fortunately found that by about 9 o'clock or even quarter to 9. 

05:57 --> 05:58

Donal:             Can you explain to the listeners the significance of the yellow house? 

05:59 --> 07:08

Jon:                 It was like a crow’s nest as I described it in the book, and it looks down on Praia da Luz from this sort of lofty raised hillside, I'd say about 200 metres above Praia da Luz looking down, and it's only a kilometre outside of the resort but has a perfect bird's eye view. It's a tiny little kind of I would call it in Spanish as a cortico, it is like a little kind of farmhouse, run down, really only one-bedroom, small garden around it. This is where Mr Christian B lived on and off for seven years, unless obviously he was travelling around a lot as we know. It became very clear that everyone was going to have this and, and, in fact, it was quite funny around 10 o'clock Laurence and I had been there, we’d taken some pictures and over the hill came a kind of cavalcade of cars the press pack arrives, about eight cars each of them with you know, a photographer and a journalist and by then all the neighbours just sort of dived inside and hid. We realised that it was time to move on and go and try and find fresh leads and find more information, coz what was clear was that he’d left the place in 2006, and he hadn’t been living there when Maddie disappeared. And the police by all accounts didn't really know where he was living when Maddie went missing, they knew he was around the area, but they didn't know where. 

07:09 --> 08:13

There was another house called the old farmhouse, which was lived in by a German woman, who I've just recently discovered died, she was a much older lady who had various dogs and he used to go there, and the story was that he was having a relationship with her. He was often seen going out into the sort of hinterland in the area rounds where this house is walking her dogs, came back and forwards. But again, the couple that lived in this house is an English couple and we knocked on their door I mean they couldn't have been more impolite, and they were just like fuck off, basically, leave us alone, go away, or we’ll call the police. I’m like really someone might have snatched and murdered a little girl you might be a little bit more helpful. We then went off and started digging around nearby, and when we got back to this little house about half an hour later, they’d put a sign up saying ‘do not contact us,’ ‘do not ring the bell,’ ‘we will call the police,’ so that was kind of a dead end as well really. In the trajectory of how the story developed, we then moved down the road coz we heard that Christian spent a lot of time with the new age travellers and hippies in a little village called Barao de Sao Joao, so we thought well we’ll zip up there. 

08:14 --> 09:23

It’s a remarkable place if you've been to Glastonbury or Orgiva actually in Spain you go in and the first thing you see is a woman sitting on the floor playing a penny flute, and then someone else selling trinkets, and then you get some guy with four dogs on strings and it’s that kind of archetypal hippie settlement. Everybody was so hostile we decided that this was where we needed to spend some time and we got um…got a hotel in Barao. While we were there we then heard about how these so called pizza parties were going on, all these sort of new age travellers were organising parties where you bought a ticket for a pizza, because they were getting round the regulations these COVID regulations, you’d go to the party because you're allowed to go and have a pizza while you were there they would then give you drugs and alcohol and you’d party into the early wee hours this is the world that Christian B was drifting around. Of course, I think now Donal that it’s pretty much established and I certainly believe it, that he was dealing a lot of these drugs to these err…new agers and was buying and selling hashish and bringing in pills and that was where he connected to that world. That’s where we were, we were not kind of not really going anywhere fast. then suddenly we got brilliant tip off from London that's where things really got exciting.

09:25 --> 09:34

Donal:             You get a real sense that you're ploughing your own furrow, but obviously being supported by the team from London and, of course, all your own contacts that you've nurtured over the years but what was the nature of the tip off from London?

09:35 --> 11:02

Jon:                 We got a tip of from one of the journalists at the MOS that there was a woman who was a friend of Christian Bs on Facebook. They’d somehow worked out that he had a Facebook page in the name of Holger, Holger Wahnsinn, which means Holger I'm crazy or Holger the madman. Amongst the friends on this Facebook page was an English lady who lived in Albufeira. The problem with Facebook is that you get a name, but you don't get an address, so by the time Laurence and I had looked at Facebook she’d obviously deleted her entire Facebook profile as had her family. Clearly someone in London, one of the journalists had obviously got in touch with her and she freaked out. We thought well we’d better go to Albufeira coz maybe that's where she lives and while we were driving to Albufeira Laurence was getting in touch with all these really sort of expat groups. People were coming back going, well I’ve heard of her but don't know where she is, and it was getting frustrating and then suddenly out of the blue, he got a message from someone called Petra in Germany in Stuttgart, no less, who said, she lives in Tunes or Foral. So, we direct messaged her and started chatting to her on Facebook Messenger. She’d seen the news by now, she said Christian B was living up in that area quite a lot as well, so I’m like where the hell’s Tunes, we looked in the map and there was this really weird little, tiny village about forty minutes inland. 

11:03 --> 12:44

I remember arriving in this Tunes place, it's a weird little town right by a railway line and with its own railway station. Nothing nice about Tunes really, I'm sorry if you live in Tunes but there's nothing really special about it. We asked every bloody person we could find, every shop, every café, bear in mind this is a lockdown, so most things are shut so we’re kind of randomly knocking on doors and showing pictures of Christian, do you know this man? Did you see this car? You know going around no, no, no, no, so that was frustrating. By about half nine we were like right we need to go and find the next place which was somewhere called Foral, and that was another sort of ten minutes inland. We got in the car and Laurence; you know he normally gets a nosebleed if he goes as far as Hampstead Heath, he’s an urban dweller. We’re driving in these dark lanes and Laurence is really beginning to freak out he’s going this is wrong, you know we shouldn't be going here, these roads are scary, and I’m going like, really Laurence, but this could be the road that Maddie was brought along. Well yeah, I know but your imagination’s running away a bit we are going right into the middle of this very dark, very sort of out the way rural area, it is weird I'll give him that and it is true that you could extrapolate that Maddie was taken there and as it turns out she may well of been. So, we eventually get to this village Foral and it's tiny, there's no signs, there's no centre, it's really just a sort of enclave of big houses with big gates. There was absolutely nothing there apart from one restaurant called O'Foral and we went into O’Foral we couldn’t knock on the doors it was like 10 o'clock at night and there's no one around. So, we went into the restaurant and sat down and thank God it had some food, it was open we sat down we thought oh we we need to start asking this owner, but he was in a really bad mood, so we thought well mmm… maybe we'll wait until he’s in a better mood and he wasn’t.  So, we came back the next morning and when we rocked up the bloody cafe was shut.

11:03 --> 12:44

Donal:             Closed Cafe and no decent coffee obviously that’s a purge against journalists.

12:44 --> 14:11

Jon:                 It was only made up by the fact that we eventually found the village President a woman called, Christine Chin who was Australian who just told us like, that this is a really weird place, with weird people, lots of strange things happen here and I'm like, ‘OK and do you recognise this VW van’ and she says, ‘yeah, yeah, I've seen that around that was here a lot’ what about him and she said, ‘I don't recognise him,’ but it was quite clear that we're in the right place. I mean this village, it was like the Stepford Wives every single house is a sort of similar size, they're all expats and they've all got it’s a sort of centre where you got all the post boxes and the names are all like Milford Haven's and The Churchills and you know one of the houses is called Hampton Court Palace, but what was interesting was there's no doubt that something very dark has gone on in this village and goes on in this village and it was a sense of that, you just get this pervading sense of eeriness. So, Laurence and I just did the classic gumshoe, we drove up and down and we knocked on every door we could come to, and anyone who was around, until around, I would say about 11:30 we happened upon one of the very few houses where you could actually drive in, it didn't have a big gate. It was amazing we parked the car up and this little old lady came out and she was German and she's probably like early eighties, she like ‘hellooooo’ and we’re like ‘hi we were just wondering if you've got any idea about this guy Christian B,’ and she said ‘ooooooooh Christian.’

14:11 --> 14:22

Donal:            That sounds like a cross between Newfoundland and Wales.

14:22 --> 15:44

Jon:                 I’ll stop doing the German accent, but she basically said, ‘look yes I've been watching the news, I've seen Christian on telly, it's definitely the Christian that was living here in the village.’ I’m like really, she said, ‘yes he lived across the roads he was living here on and off easily for years, at least two periods it's the Christian B that they’re looking for, the police,’ so I straight away saw it and I straight away realised. Anyway her husband at this point started shouting because we were outside the house he said well you know, ‘what are you doing’ obviously in German, and so I said, ‘yeah hi we’re journalists investigating this case’ and he said, ‘come in,’ so we was brought in sat down, you couldn't meet a nicer couple they just then said I mean it was just one of those moments when the case just opened up in front of us and he started saying ‘look he lived in this house across the road this Villa Bianca. In that house lived a woman called Nicole who rented it. This Christian guy used to turn up in a leather jacket with a gun,’ she said, ‘that this Nicole used to look after young children who were orphans who’d been abused, who came from Germany, one of them ran away, came back pregnant,’ she said, ‘that Christian B had been brought in to go and find this girl, this poor girl and she said, ‘it was like a really bad time in the village, it was horrible, there was lots of robberies going on burglaries,’ she said, ‘at one point Nicole had told her to carry mace around the village,’ she said ‘I was like in my seventies and being told to carry mace around a little village half an hour inland from the Algarve. And in the middle of this was Christian B. 

15:45 --> 15:54

Donal:             You had hit upon this golden nugget because every time you hit Christian B, if you get somebody that knew him closely that was another step in the journey to be able to try and find out who this guy was.

15:54 --> 16:17

Jon:                 When things start to unravel, and you find the information you need it's obviously very exciting and we realised now that we were really on to working out this guy's life and what he was doing and why he’d been there. Laurence and I knew that we were a step ahead of everyone else. I mean there were no other journalists in this village at all, no one else had been there. What was really interesting that Ingrid and Peter said, ‘not a single policeman knocked on our doors nobody.’

16:18 --> 16:42

Donal:             Part of my criticism about the Maddie McCann investigation as there’s been millions and millions poured into it by journalists, and film makers, and documentary makers, and there's been millions poured into it by the Portuguese police by Interpol, by individual forces in the UK. We know thirteen to fourteen million probably at this stage by the metropolitan police and here is a journalist knocking on the door and making inroads.

16:43 --> 17:05

Jon:                 We are doing the job that the Portuguese police should have been doing in 2007, which actually I think the British police should have been doing, given the amount of money that went into Operation Grange between 2007 or 2009 or 10 when it was set up, right the way through to the present day, and then the German police oddly who have also been working on it as we discovered since 2017 in fact  2016 they haven't even been to this village.

17:06 --> 17:44

Donal:             One wants to understand why this case hasn’t been solved. It's kind of not hard here we are thirteen or fourteen years afterwards and the German police professional experts weren’t doing basic door knocking, the Portuguese police were so far behind the curve it's unbelievable. The metropolitan police who were desperate to come on board and thought this would save them from the scandal with the Lawrence inquiry, the Daniel Morgan, the corruption, they thought this is our saving grace this is our rescue. Even they couldn't do basic door knocking, is it just ineptitude or is it incompetent either which way there's no way freelance journalists knocking on the door should be hitting these marks ahead of them.

17:45 --> 18:25

Jon:                 I couldn't agree more, I find it to this day absolutely staggering that in this village Christian Brueckner lived on and off for a number of years and then lived around the corner in as I discovered in Baracal which is a little hamlet about five minutes away. He was living there on and off for years, his best friends were living in this village around the corner. In this village you have what's called the Institute of Algarve the recondition of children IARPS that brought German children in on a regular basis and there’d been a scandal and they'd been closed down and all the money had been taken. Nobody thought this is a place we need to be focusing on, this place explains entirely everything you need to know about Christian B his livelihood and everything what he got up to. 

18:34 --> 18:42

Donal:             Here you are ahead of the posse thirteen years on, and you're simply saying if I'm here, why aren't the police here ahead of me?

18:42 --> 18:50

Jon:                 And I'm saying that there were so many clues there. Surely this is the place that the police should be going to, surely, they must realise there’s a link, there’s connection here.

18:42 --> 18:53

Donal:             So, Jon how did you develop the story from there? 

18:54 --> 20:43

Jon:                 What was clear from what Peter and Ingrid said was that they believed there was child abuse going on in their village, and they were not comfortable and not happy there. We realised that we obviously needed to go and knock on the door this Villa Bianca, we didn't know who is going to be living there. In fact, Peter and Ingrid they said, well the owner of the house I think is back in there she's Australian, well, she’s actually Portuguese but she lived in Australia for years, a woman called Leah. We walk up to this house which is about four hundred metres up from Ingrid and Peters house and it looks from a distance quite privileged as you imagine that lovely arcadia you know that expats live, the beautiful countryside surrounded with trees and we thought this looks quite nice but then as you got closer you realised that the paint was peeling that the gates was rusty and more than that there were about twelve or fifteen dogs running around barking like mad, there was rubbish everywhere, there was cars up on bricks. We could not knock there, and we were both, and I’m a fully grown man and I've done this job for twenty years or twenty-five years, I was nervous I was worried about knocking on this door. I don't know something about it just gave me the creeps and so we both said look let's just go get coffee and let's make a plan. We said right we're going to tape this and we're gonna stay here, be very careful and have the car ready, so if we gotta leave quickly we leave quickly. We weren't sure whether this was like run by some mafia gang that was running a child network and we… we just didn't know. And you've been in this position yourself you wanna be prepared, we haven’t got a camera crew filming it. Anyway, so we got there, and we banged on this door and the dogs start going completely mad, and eventually a head pokes out, and said ‘what?’ so I said, ‘hi could you know, wave through the gate could you come down?’ And she’s like you know, this woman sort of stumbles out in her dressing gown and wanders down and the funniest sort of Australian accent says, ‘What do you boys want?’ you know this ridiculous Australian accent I couldn't believe it. ‘Hi, we've actually come all away from Spain we’re investigating the case of Madeleine McCann and Christian Brueckner. 

20:44 --> 21:08

It was almost like this moment she just wanted to unload she’d obviously never been asked. You saw this sort of look on her face, oh my god I've got to tell you the full story here, and she just poured out heart about what an awful time it had been, and how she’d rented the house out, and she said there was this crazy guy Christian, yeah and he came in, he had a gun on his hip was always wearing a leather jacket he was a real strange guy.

21:09 --> 21:25

Donal:             So here you stumbled upon somebody giving you an intimate portrait of Christian Brueckneraround the time when Maddie went missing the company, he was keeping the clothes he was wearing the gun on his hip his demeanour his activities and his movements what more could she divulge?

21:26 --> 22:59

Jon:                 Well, she told us that Nicole was German and that she came from the same town that Bruekneractually came from, Würzburg. She said she had to get, launch a legal case to get Nicole out of the house unbeknown to her, she was getting beaten so badly by her partner, Nicole, that she actually left in the middle of the night she was taken in a van back to Germany. Was this Christian? I mean I don't know if Christian took her, because Christian was clearly dating her at the time and living on and off in this house and would regularly bring his Winnebago van. He actually regularly brought his VW van which was parked outside, and quite often seen inside the house as well, as outside the restaurant up the road. When she finally got possession of her house again having had Nicole evicted, she founds drugs in the house, the house in a terrible mess, she said they’d found spoons showing heroin, she’d found lumps of hash. I said what did you do with it? I mean did you give it to the police? did you contact police? and she said no, no, I burnt it. So, it's kind of a sense of well there’s lots and lots of stuff going on here, loads of clues so have the police been? ‘no.’ The police hadn’t even been like about three months ago to her house to properly look. I mean there had been claims that Maddy could be buried in the garden of this house, and they haven't been to have a proper look round it.

23:00 --> 23:02

Donal:             What else did she have to say about his activities?

23:02 --> 24:19

Jon:                 She said she didn't know him that well, but he worked for a time at O'Foral restaurant, as did Nicole. He's definitely involved in thefts and burglaries in the village and apparently, he was offering fenced goods. In this O’Foral restaurant which is… which is… amazing really, because apparently this is where the Russians were hanging out, in this restaurant. When this girl sixteen-year-old girl, when in fact fifteen-year-old girl arrives, I'm not sure she was either fifteen or sixteen was actually taken away, went missing for eleven full days and she'd been seen with three Russian guys in this restaurant O'Foral. She'd apparently vanished and when she came back coz Christian Brueckner apparently brought her back, which is all very weird, and she came back, and she was pregnant, and this is what no one really knew, but suddenly there was a baby on the scene living in this house, and Nicole supposedly passed it off as her child, but it was actually this girl Leana’s child.  Anyway, I managed to… because they’d filed a police missing person’s report… I managed to get a copy of that report from the local police station in Mazine. This is what Lena and Ingrid and Peter said, this was a major scandal for the village this young girl going missing. She turned up and she’d apparently been kept in a house in a little village called Algoz about 20 minutes away and she gone with these Russians one was called Ivan, she said there were Ukrainian, she said they just she just stayed in the house, and she just cooked for them she said I didn't have sex with them. 

24:20 --> 25:08

I've traced her in Germany, I've tried to talk to about it she won't talk she just doesn’t want to say anything, but there's something so wrong about it. And when she came back, she had to go and do a missing persons like return report, if you like typical Portuguese police, who did they get to translate this report? So, when she went to the police station to explain what happened in these eleven days, she’d gone missing who was translating the police report? well, obviously, Nicole, it was a very short interview about fifteen-minute interview and Nicole pretty much said look she doesn’t want to say anything, doesn’t want to say anything. I mean nothing happened she's fine, she's fit, and well, and the police didn't think to actually look any deeper obviously or investigate it. But what happened here was clearly a bit of a forerunner of unfortunately, what happened in a much wider scope over the next few years and I'm sure is connected in some way to the missing Madeleine McCann.

25:09 --> 25:16

Donal:             What do we know about how the German police have now investigated that particular part of Christian Brueckner’s story and his life. 

25:17 --> 26:55

Jon:                 I discovered that Nicole has now been interviewed three times by the German police and is being treated as a fairly key witness in the case. Her own father, Dieter, I've spoken to, I have interviewed at length in Germany in his house, is not talking to her anymore and is very concerned about what she was doing. And in fact, we got without a doubt one of the most sensational lines from the father of Nicole of this whole case so far, which was concerning the transportation of children in a hidden compartment in a Winnebago that Christian Brueckner owns.

26:55 --> 27:00

Donal:             What was peculiar and particular but this Winnebago that raised the concerns of Dieter?

27:00 --> 28:24

Jon:                 Dieter was fairly forthcoming and fairly friendly and of course, remembered Christian B well, because he'd actually come down to Portugal in 2007, he said around… he wasn't sure if it was in April or March, April, May June, he couldn't, he just couldn't remember when it was. But he did remember that he met Christian Brueckner inside the front garden of this property Villa Bianco in Foral, and he remembered very well that he had this enormous Winnebago. This guy was personable and friendly, and, in fact, when he told me later he said that Christian was playing with his granddaughter on the lawn in front of the house, apparently, he’d come in and use it and park up when he charged the electricity and he filled the water, he’d have a shower in the house, but I mean he's certainly having a relationship with Nicole. He's meeting the boyfriend of his daughter for the first time or a good friend anyway and he said, the guy was open, and he said I’m a drug dealer, I have a very special job I move marijuana around um… around Europe, basically. 

28:24 --> 28:28

Donal:             This conversation with Dieter, is obviously crucial in your investigation into Christian Brueckner.

28:28 --> 29:35

Jon:                  I should probably read you the exact quote coz it's… it's… so amazing. So, he's recalling the conversation in the Spring of 2007 around the time Maddie went missing. He said basically he’d gone in to look inside this van which had a bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen, he later said it had a very odd smell which he later put down to marijuana. Anyway, he said as I looked inside, I asked him Herr Brueckner what do you do in Portugal? what is your job? he told me I work I get money coz I have a special business; I transport grass in my van, ie, cannabis.  I was surprised I did not believe it exactly, but Brueckner told me again, I have 50 kilogrammes of grass and I transport it around Europe, nobody can see it, nobody can find it, I thought he was joking. He told me I can transport children, kids in this space, drugs and children nobody can find them nobody can catch you. Ten minutes later he added I believe he kidnapped Maddy and brought her out of Portugal in this big van. At the time I thought he was interested in my daughter, he was a bad boy, I felt as a father my daughter was not safe with such a man, he then said I want to kill Brueckner my daughter was in danger at the time, as was her daughter who was six, because he is a paedophile and a dangerous paedophile at that.