Sehnde (Germany) (AFP) - The top suspect in the 2007 disappearance of British toddler Madeleine McCann in Portugal was released from a German prison on Wednesday wearing an electronic ankle tag.

Christian Brueckner, 48 – who had finished a seven-year jail term for raping a 72-year-old American woman – has not been charged in the McCann case because of a lack of evidence, prosecutors say.

He was driven out of the Sehnde prison in northern Germany in the back of his lawyer’s car with tinted windows, which then sped off, joined by two police vans, AFP journalists and a prison official said.

German prosecutors have accused Brueckner of being behind the disappearance of McCann, widely known as “Maddie” – the notorious missing person case which has captivated the world media for years.

Three-year-old Madeleine vanished from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in Portugal’s Algarve region in May 2007 while her parents dined at a nearby tapas bar.

Despite a huge international manhunt, global media attention and multiple leads that went cold, no trace of her has ever been found and no one has been charged over her disappearance.

German prosecutors in a bombshell announcement in 2020 named Brueckner, who is known to have lived in the area on and off at the time, as their top suspect.

The chief prosecutor, Christian Wolters, told AFP that a lack of solid evidence prevented them from laying charges against Brueckner, who denies the claims against him.

Brueckner will now have to wear an electronic ankle tag for five years and report to a probation officer once a month, Wolters said.

He will also have to obtain court permission to change his residential address or his location. Failure to comply could lead to a fine or up to three years in prison.

Der Spiegel news magazine also reported that Brueckner’s passport was taken away and the validity of his ID card restricted to German soil.

- ‘Top league of dangerousness’ -

Days before Brueckner’s release, Wolters warned in an AFP interview that the repeat sexual offender remains “dangerous” and was considered likely to reoffend.

Brueckner’s defence lawyer Friedrich Fuelscher told public broadcaster NDR that the comments by the public prosecutor “will have an impact on his future life”.

He predicted Brueckner might struggle to find a job or a flat and to reintegrate into society because “people will not want to have any kind of contact with a suspected child murderer”.

Brueckner was first convicted of sexually abusing children when he was still a teenager. By 2020, his criminal record contained 17 entries, including causing bodily injury, theft and drink driving.

During his latest trial, a psychiatric expert described him as being in the “absolute top league of dangerousness” and highly likely to reoffend, according to German media reports.

At the time he was revealed as a suspect in the McCann case, Brueckner was serving a sentence for drug trafficking.

He was also charged in October 2022 with five separate counts of rape and child sex abuse allegedly committed between 2000 and 2017 in the same region of Portugal where Maddie went missing.

But he was acquitted on all charges, thwarting prosecutors’ hopes of keeping him in jail while they continued to investigate the Maddie case.

Prosecutors in Braunschweig, where Brueckner was tried on the 2022 charges, have applied for a retrial in a different court, but a decision on those proceedings is not expected before next year.

In June, police combed an overgrown area and abandoned buildings in Portugal near where Brueckner lived at the time, but without so far announcing that they have found any evidence.

Wolters said German investigations into Maddie’s disappearance were ongoing.

Prosecutors “have not yet evaluated everything” found during the new search in Praia da Luz, he said, adding that there are also still “other lines of inquiry”.