Between 2000 and 2017, Christian Brückner, 47, who is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence in Germany for rape, was found not guilty of carrying out three rapes and two cases of sexual abuse in Portugal.
In the 2007 disappearance and unsolved case of Madeleine McCann in Portugal, Brückner has not been accused.
The defense team for Brückner had maintained that there was insufficient evidence to convict him, while the prosecution had requested a further 15 years in prison at the court in Braunschweig, northern Germany.
The trial started in February, and in the summer, the court revoked an arrest order related to the case, which some observers took as a sign that Brückner might not go to trial.
The acquittal, according to his attorney Friedrich Fülscher, was “the only correct outcome of the case” because the identities of two of the rape victims, an elderly woman and an adolescent, were unknown.
Prior to this, a pivotal witness testified during the trial that he had broken into Brückner’s Portuguese home and discovered films showing the rape of a 70- to 80-year-old mother and a girl. Later, an Irish woman told the court that a masked guy had broken into her apartment when she was 21 and sexually assaulted her.
