The prime suspect in Madeleine McCann’s disappearance worked in the tapas bar her parents were at the night she disappeared, according to a man who knew him.

German criminal Christian Brueckner, 47, lived just a 12-minute drive from the Ocean Club tapas bar frequented by Kate and Gerry McCann.

The McCann family were staying at the resort in Praia da Luz, in Portugal’s Algarve region, when Madeleine went missing from their holiday apartment in 2007 when she was just three years old.

Now it’s emerged Brueckner worked cash-in-hand at the restaurant, according to claims from a British acquaintance, Ken Ralphs, MailOnline reported.

This may have given him access to a booking ledger showing staff that McCann’s children would be alone that night.

Ralphs, who knew Brueckner at the time, claims the German man recruited a mutual friend as part of a plot to kidnap a child just a week before Madeleine disappeared.

They intended to sell the youngster to a childless couple, the 59-year-old claimed.

But he believes the extensive media coverage highlighting a distinctive mark in Madeleine’s eye made it impossible to sell her.

Ralphs fears they felt they had no choice but to ‘dispose’ of Madeleine after they kidnapped her while her parents were out with friends dubbed ‘The Tapas Seven’.

He took his suspicions to police in both Portugal and the UK immediately after Madeleine’s disappearance.

But he still doesn’t know if they ever used the information in their investigations – and he’s not alone.

Brueckner was named as the chief suspect in the case by German prosecutors in 2020, more than 13 years after Madeleine vanished.

He’s never been charged in connection with the case and he denies having any involvement in her disappearance.

Brueckner is currently in a German prison for the rape of a 72-year-old woman in her Praia da Luz home in 2005.

He is on trial for five unrelated charges, including three of rape, alleged to have been committed in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.

All the attacks took place close to where Madeleine vanished in Praia da Luz in May 2007, it is claimed.

Brueckner spent 12 years living in and around the small resort town as part of the region’s drifter community.

Ralphs, a former community champion in Greater Manchester, ended up there after fleeing the UK in 2004 because a police blunder put his name in the hands of suspected criminals.

He started receiving death threats after giving police information on a gangland murder for which the suspects were cleared.

Once in Praia da Luz, he and his wife joined the drifter community, moving from place to place in a campervan.

Ralphs had seen Brueckner at car boot sales, town centres and camping spots on the region’s beaches.

They met through a mutual friend, a penniless man who lived in a hidden encampment with his wife, children and Brueckner in Carrapateira – 10 miles from Praia da Luz.

After spending a night sitting around a campfire drinking beers alongside their families, the mutual friend told Ralphs about Brueckner’s plan.

‘We sat by the fire until the early hours of the morning, and that’s when [John] started to cry and confess’, Ralphs told MailOnline.

‘[He] told me Christian was planning to take a child from Praia da Luz. He then clarified it was not ransom, but that it was to take a child to sell to a German couple who could not have children of their own.

‘He assured me the child would not be harmed.’

The friend asked Ralphs to keep it a secret, telling him: ‘Christian knew many people who will pay good money for a child who cannot give birth, and that the child would be taken from a rich family with more than one child [of their own] so the parents would not grieve as badly.’

He tried to convince his friend to stay away from the criminal world, even offering to train him in his work fixing caravan satellites so he wouldn’t be part of Brueckner’s plot.

But they never spoke of it again. A week later, Madeleine was gone.

Ralphs was visiting his dad in Stockport when the news broke.

‘First thing I said was “Oh for f*** sake”. My dad asked what’s the matter, and I told my dad,’ he said.

Keen to avoid dealing with police in Manchester again, he travelled to Workington in Cumbria and delivered a statement informing them of the plans and that Brueckner worked at Ocean Club, Ralphs said.

He also gave Cumbria Police a hand-drawn map of the teepee camp in Portugal, urging them to pass it to Portuguese officials searching for Madeleine.

Cumbria Police said it had no record of Ralphs’ statement from 2007.

Ralphs returned to Portugal days later to look for his friend at the encampment only to find all but a bamboo cage destroyed by fire.

He found the surviving item ‘unusual because the cage wasn’t there before’.

After searching other beaches, he found another mutual acquaintance, a French man who informed him their friend had left him his dog as he was going to Africa.

He gave his information directly to the Portuguese police but was told his friend claimed not to know him and that he’d unlikely been involved because he had a family of his own.

Ralphs was ‘gobsmacked’ to then run into an apron-clad Brueckner near Ocean Club, where police were interviewing all staff members.

Brueckner, however, may have slipped under their radar because he worked there off the books.

When Brueckner was named a suspect in 2020, Ralphs went back to British and Portuguese police but both told him they didn’t have his original statements from 2007.

Ocean Club did not respond to MailOnline’s requests for comment.

A fresh flurry of calls and tips has flowed towards investigators since Brueckner appeared in a German court last week.

One of the rapes he is on trial for was so brutal his victim feared the knife-armed Brueckner would behead her, the court in Braunschweig heard.

The other two rape attacks were allegedly committed against an elderly woman in her 70s and a girl aged 14.

Brueckner will not respond to any of the charges he faces.

His lawyer Friedrich Fülscher dismissed the evidence as ‘abysmal’ and said: ‘The defendant is using his right to remain silent.’

‘Our client has been subject to media attention, he has been accused of kidnapping and killing Madeleine McCann by members of the media and prosecutors, without evidence,’ he added.

‘We are not dealing with the worst criminal story of the post-war period but it will be hard for the court to put it out of their minds.’

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A sickening online chat between the prime suspect in the Madeleine McCann case and another paedophile ‘could be a hint’ as to who is responsible for her disappearance.

The three-year-old vanished from an apartment in the Algarve in May 2007 and convicted sexual predator Christian Brueckner has been identified as the key suspect because of his movements in Portugal at the time. 

German police have uncovered a vile exchange between Brueckner and another paedophile on his computer in which he writes explicitly about wanting to abduct and kill a little girl.

A public prosecutor leading the investigation, which has now dragged on for 16 years, says the conversation may provide a crucial clue because of the use of the letters ‘mm’.

In the chat, which was too sickening to be made public in full, Breuckner describes how he wants to ‘document’ his kidnap and murder of a child.

One message from Breuckner reads, ‘oh, if the evidence is destroyed,’ to which the other paedophile replies: ‘Mm.’

Hans Christian Wolters, a prosecutor in Braunschweig, told BBC’s Panorama: ‘Yeah, maybe it could be a hint. It could be. Of course, it’s important for us.’

When asked if it could be part of a ‘bundle of evidence that could convict Brueckner’, Mr Wolters said: ‘Yes, this could be something like that. That could be a piece for the big puzzle.’ 

Mr Wolters said he is ‘sure’ that the toddler is dead, that she was killed in Portugal and that they only have ‘one suspect’ – Brueckner. 

‘We think that he was involved in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann,’ he said.

‘And we think that he murdered Madeleine McCann. That’s our stand.’

The 46-year-old is currently behind bars in northern Germany serving a seven-year sentence for the rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Praia da Luz in 2005 – the same village where Madeleine went missing.

He is being held at a high-security prison locally named as the ‘Alcatraz of the North’ in Oldenburg, near Bremen, and is accused of a string of further crimes in the area between 2000 and 2017.

It’s alleged that he carried out two sex attacks on children and three rapes, two of which he reportedly filmed at his former residence in Praia da Luz.

The trial, which is expected to last at least one month, could begin as soon as February next year and is likely to be held at Braunschweig High Court after it was ruled that Brueckner can be tried in Germany for the alleged crimes.

German prosecutors have not yet charged Brueckner in connection with the disappearance of Madeleine and the case against him is not yet fully known. 

But his history as a convicted thief, child abuser and rapist is well documented and the recently discovered online chat evidence suggests that he appears to have fantasized about abducting and killing a young girl. 

Investigators also say his phone puts him near the ground floor apartment 5A on Rua Dr Agostinho da Silva where Madeleine was staying when she disappeared while on holiday with her parents Kate and Gerry McCann. 

After getting hold of his phone number from May 2007, transmitter data showed he received a call near apartment 5A between 7.32pm and 8.02pm on the night Madeleine vanished – she was reported missing at 10pm.

Mr Wolters says he is ‘sure’ that Brueckner was near the apartment that night but when questioned as to who was on the other end of the line, he admitted: ‘We don’t know. We know only the number.’

He said that the call is ‘very important’ to the investigation.

‘We have some kind of evidence,’ Mr Wolters said. ‘So maybe these are pictures, videos, chats, documents, something like that.’

In May this year, an extensive three-day search operation was carried out by police at a reservoir near Praia da Luz that Brueckner once called his ‘little piece of paradise’ and would stay at in his campervan.

Mr Wolters said: ‘At the reservoir, we are searching for evidence, not for the body of Madeleine.

‘I can’t speak about the results because the investigation of the things we found there is still ongoing.’

Officers had previously found child pornography on USB sticks buried under Brueckner’s dead dog at an abandoned factory in eastern Germany he owned and used to live at.

It’s thought that USB sticks may be among the items investigators were searching for at the reservoir in Portugal, the BBC reported.

When asked about when the case could be solved, Mr Wolters added: ‘I hope that we will come to an end in the next year. 

‘Maybe we need some more time but I hope that we will finish the investigation in the next year.’

It also emerged that Portuguese police travelled to London earlier this year to apologise to Madeleine’s father Gerry in person for the way he and his family were treated.

Brueckner has denied killing Madeleine and wrote a string of dark letters from his prison cell to protest his innocence.

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