German prosecutors say there is substantial evidence missing British toddler Madeleine McCann is dead but that isn’t strong enough to charge the prime suspect.
The three-year-old disappeared while on holiday in Portugal in 2007, with 43-year-old German man Christian Bruckner identified this month as the prime suspect.
Braunschweig prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters told the BBC the evidence against Mr Bruckner - who is currently serving a jail term for drug-dealing, having been extradited from Portugal in 2017 - may not be enough.
"We have evidence against the accused which leads us to believe that he really killed Madeleine, but this evidence is not strong enough at the moment to take him to court,” he said.
Despite the evidence being "strong enough to say that the girl is dead and strong enough to accuse a specific individual of murder”, Mr Wolters said “one has to be honest and remain open to the possibility that our investigation could end without a charge, that it ends like the others have”.
"We are optimistic it will be different for us, but for that we need more information."
In 2019, Mr Bruckner was sentenced to seven years for raping a 72-year-old American woman in the same Portuguese resort in 2005.
The conviction has been appealed in the German courts.
The 43-year-old is believed to have been in the Praia da Luz area in 2007 when McCann went missing.
Mr Bruckner has also been investigated over the disappearance of a German girl, named only as Inga, according to German media.
The five-year-old went missing from a family party in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt in May 2015 and has never been found.
The suspect was regularly living in the Algarve in Portugal between 1995 and 2007 and had jobs including in catering, but he also committed burglaries in hotels and dealt drugs, German media have reported.
The BBC was told by a senior Portuguese judicial source that the joint investigation into the new suspect began in 2017 after a tip-off in Germany.
Investigators were told by a friend of the suspect that he had made a "disturbing comment" in a German bar while watching coverage of the 10th anniversary of Madeleine's disappearance, according to the source.
The long-running case of McCann, who vanished shortly before her fourth birthday, has intrigued Britain for years. Her parents say Madeleine went missing after they had left her and her twin siblings asleep in their holiday complex while they had dinner with friends at a nearby restaurant.
An investigation by British police has identified more than 600 people as being potentially significant.
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