Christian B trial: Lawyer for Madeleine McCann suspect claims he is a victim of prejudiced prosecutors
A defence lawyer for Christian B has accused the public prosecutor's office of losing "emotional distance" from the case and also claimed the police investigations were "amateur".
Monday 7 October 2024 15:38, UK
The man accused of a string of sex crimes has been put on trial simply because he is also a suspect for the unrelated disappearance of Madeleine McCann, his lawyer has told a judge.
Christian B, as he is known under German privacy laws, is the victim of prejudiced prosecutors and an amateurish police investigation, the court heard.
Defence lawyer Friedrich Fulscher said: "This story will teach us what terrible consequences it can have when the investigating officers of the public prosecutor's office lose the necessary emotional distance from a case and this attitude is combined disastrously with amateur investigations by a police authority."
Mr Fulscher urged the judge to acquit the German drifter, who denies three rapes and two child sex assaults.
He said Christian B, 47, should never have been charged with the offences, said to have been committed between 2000 and 2017 along Portugal's Algarve coast where he had been living intermittently.
"Your decision [to prosecute] would have been different if the accused had not been Christian B, the man to whom you also want to attribute an offence which has attracted the attention of the world public and which lay like a fog over these proceedings," said Mr Fulscher.
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German prosecutors have said they believe Christian B abducted Madeleine McCann, the three-year-old British girl who vanished from her family's rented holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in 2007, and they believe she is dead.
The suspect has not been charged with Madeleine's disappearance and denies any involvement.
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Tap hereHis trial in Braunschweig on unrelated sex offences began in February and a verdict is expected on Tuesday.
In his closing speech his lawyer Mr Fulscher accused two main prosecution witnesses of lying about video tapes they claimed to have seen allegedly showing Christian B raping an elderly woman and a girl of about 14 in his rented home in Portugal.
And the lawyer suggested former Irish holiday rep Hazel Behan had been wrong to identify Christian B as the man who raped her in her room in 2004.
She had described her attacker as having a distinctive cross-like mark on his right thigh, but he had no such marking, the judge was told.
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Ms Behan may have been influenced by media stories about Christian B after it was reported he was the Madeleine suspect in 2020 and had been convicted of a rape in 2005, the court heard.
Christian B is serving a seven-year sentence for the rape of an American woman at her villa in Praia da Luz in 2005. He could be freed from that sentence in the spring.
In a closing speech last week the chief prosecutor Ute Lindemann described Christian B as "a sadistic psychopath" and urged the judge to jail him for 15 years for the five sex crimes for which he is on trial.