"Once he totally lost it when we sat with friends and had a conversation about the Maddie case. He wanted us to stop talking about it. He shouted, 'The child is dead now and that's a good thing'."
"Once he totally lost it when we sat with friends and had a conversation about the Maddie case. He wanted us to stop talking about it. He shouted, 'The child is dead now and that's a good thing'."
A barmaid who used to work for Christian Brueckner, the new main suspect in the Madeleine McCann case, claims the paedophile told her McCann was dead and made a number of other chilling claims.
Lenta Johlitz, 34, was a close friend of Brueckner when working with him at his kiosk pub in the German city of Braunschweig.
She told German newspaper Bild that in 2014, the paedophile became agitated when McCann flashed up on the TV screen, claiming he shouted "the child is dead now and that's it".
"Once he totally lost it when we sat together with friends and had a conversation about the Maddie case. He wanted us to stop talking about it. He shouted, 'The child is dead now and that's a good thing'."
He also allegedly said: "You can make a corpse disappear quickly! Pigs also eat human flesh!"
On Wednesday, German prosecutors announced that a 43-year-old man was being investigated on suspicion of murdering the 3-year-old, who vanished without a trace while on holiday with her family in Praia da Luz, Portugal on May 3, 2007.
"Once he totally lost it when we sat with friends and had a conversation about the Maddie case. He wanted us to stop talking about it. He shouted, 'The child is dead now and that's a good thing'."
Johlitz's story comes after a former caretaker described how Brueckner would gift toys and teddy bears to little children as they walked to school less than 100m from his pub.
Peter Erdmann, 64, who worked at the Grundschule Hohsteig, a primary school for around 300 children, said: "The kids would come to school holding ponies and teddy bears. I used to ask them where they got them from, and they used to tell me, 'Christian at the kiosk gave it to us'.
"He used to give the kids the presents when they walked past the kiosk in the morning."
Erdmann, who worked at the school between 1999 and 2016, said he never thought anything of it, and admitted Brueckner came across as friendly.
"I even asked him if he gave gifts to the kids, and he told me he had a little box full in the kiosk.
"It turns my stomach now to think of his intentions and I wish I had raised what was going on with my bosses at the time."
A former girlfriend of the 43-year-old has also come forward saying he used to strangle her and hit her.
The barmaid's claims come just a day after a witness claimed they saw McCann emerging from a restaurant called Tunnels in Alcossebre in Spain on May 28, 2007, before getting into a Volkswagen van more than 900km from where she went missing.
The suspect's battered campervan. Scotland Yard released images of the VW T3 Westfalia camper, with a white upper body, yellow skirting and a Portuguese registration plate.
"Location given as a restaurant called Tunnels, in an old castle at an area called Cap Y Corp, Alcossebre, Spain. She was seen to leave with a man in a Volkswagen van.
"We request the Spanish police check the location for any CCTV or witnesses. We request German vehicle details. Can the vehicle be circulated for a stop and check to be carried out if seen," the report read.
The sighting, one of dozens in the early weeks of the investigation, has taken on new significance since German paedophile Christian Brueckner was identified last week as a key suspect in the case.
British detectives believe the 43-year-old was living out of a battered VW T3 Westfalia campervan in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz at the time of Madeleine's disappearance.
