MADDIE: PRIME SUSPECT LINKED TO SECOND MISSING GIRL

POLICE PROBE SUSPECT’S LINKS TO ABDUCTED INGA

- John Twomey and Andy Lines

THE paedophile now at the centre of the Madeleine McCann case is being linked to a second missing little girl.

Police are investigating prime suspect Christian Brueckner over Inga Gehricke.

She vanished in Germany eight years after Madeleine was snatched. The revelation comes as German police decide whether to charge Brueckner over Madeleine’s disappearance.

Inga was just five when she vanished while on a family outing in Saxony-Anhalt in May 2015. No trace of her has been found.

Brueckner, 43, was living in a caravan on the site of a disused factory about 50 miles from the scene at the time.

German police are now investigating “connections” between the cases involving Madeleine and Inga, officials revealed yesterday.

Madeleine disappeared on May 3, 2007, and Inga on May 2, 2015.

One source said: “It is a real race against time to get him on the charge sheet if the evidence exists to link him to Madeleine’s disappearance.”

Brueckner is currently in jail in Kiel, north Germany, where he has nearly served two-thirds of a sentence for drugs charges.

Last December he was jailed for seven years for rape but this sentence has yet to be “ratified” and his lawyers have launched an appeal.

Brueckner was sentenced for raping a 72-year-old American widow at her home in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in September 2005.

Three-year-old Madeleine was snatched from her family’s holiday apartment in the same town.