Police have warned of what they might find during their search for Madeleine McCann’s body in a lake - in an area the prime suspect in her disappearance called his “little paradise”.
Last month detectives from the Federal Criminal Police (BKA), Germany’s equivalent of the FBI , spent several days searching land next to the Arade Dam. As reported by the Mirror, they used radar, sniffer dogs and search teams to scour the location just 31 miles from where three-year-old Maddie vanished in 2007.
Prime suspect Christian Brueckner, 45, once referred to the location as his "little paradise". And in an effort to track down clues as to if Maddie had been thrown in, police dug several deep boreholes.
However, in a blow to Maddie’s family, it's understood detectives are set to confirm they have not found anything of note. German public prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters told Bild: “Please don’t expect too much.”
The reason as to why investigators decided to search the land near the dam so thoroughly still remains unclear. Officers were seen methodically chopping down trees and hacking away at undergrowth to expose an area just a short distance from the water.
Images appear to show the remains of a camp at the mysterious spot with a torn ship’s buoy, broken furniture and even what appeared to be a makeshift toilet fashioned from a chair. Sources in Portugal point to an informant giving police a specific tip-off that Brueckner visited the site just days after Maddie went missing from her room in Praia da Luz.
This tip-off is believed to have been matched with geolocation clues found in the convicted paedophile's vile stash of 8,000 of videos and images. Together it is thought these clues combined sparked the search at the remote site.
It was claimed they were searching for a camcorder and a gun tossed into the water but Portuguese police sources were quick to dismiss that. Regardless of what is found at the site, top German criminal profiler Axel Petermann, says the cops were right to dig at a place so close to Brueckner's heart.
He told The Mirror: “The criminal perpetrators who I got to know over the years tend to hide their victims in places where they feel safe and can assess danger.
“These are places which are secluded and secret and where they can stop and assess various risks.
“They can also be places where they feel good, and where there is a certain private memory of a certain act.
“So, I think the search activity may have been going in this direction.
“My recommendation when dealing with suspects in the case of missing people, is always to find the places where these suspects spent time, where they had secrets, where they could assess risks, so from this point of view I think the investigators’ current search was very important.”
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