German police search Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brueckner’s rental van

Madeleine McCann disappeared in 2007 while on holiday with her parents and siblings.

German criminal police are searching a rental van used by the suspected kidnapper of Madeleine McCann.

The white Mercedes-Benz Sprinter was pictured parked outside Christian Brueckner’s gruesome lair, where he buried horrific images of child sexual abuse and bestiality under the corpse of his dead dog.

The police are examining it in the hope it may still contain DNA or other clues in any of Brueckner’s suspected crimes.

An employee at the Rosier dealership in Braunschweig, Germany, where it was rented from, told The Sun newspaper “we cleaned it and repaired it but it wouldn’t have been wiped of all DNA. There could still be hairs and other traces of anyone who was kept inside.”

Brueckner, the prime suspect in McCann’s disappearance, bought an abandoned factory in the former East German town of Neuwegersleben in 2010.

This was just 90km from where Inga Gehricke, aged 5, disappeared while at a picnic with her family in 2015.

At the time she disappeared, a white Sprinter van was spotted driving down a track of the forest.

Brueckner was unable to produce an alibi for the day in question when he was interviewed by police and was involved in a car accident a short drive away a day earlier, but charges were dropped due to a lack of concrete evidence.

Christian Brueckner is the prime suspect in Madeleine McCann’s disappearance.

The case has not been solved, but Brueckner has not yet been officially discounted as a suspect.

Despite intense police searches and a nationwide appeal for information about Inga’s whereabouts, she has never been found.

Brueckner is believed to have had a white van in Praia de Luz when 3-year-old Madeleine disappeared in 2007 while on holiday with her parents and siblings.

His white van was reportedly often sighted in Braunschwieg, Lower Saxony, where he would keep a mattress in the back for sexual encounters with women from the internet.

The convicted rapist and paedophile is currently on trial for a number of offences on Portugal’s Algarve coast between 2000 and 2017.

They include the rapes of an Irish holiday rep and a woman in her 70s, and of an unknown girl aged around 14, as well as the sexual assault of a 10-year-old girl.

Brueckner, who is currently serving a seven-year jail sentence for the rape of an elderly US woman in 2005, denies all the charges against him.