According to prosecutors, Brückner’s existing seven-year prison sentence, which was sentenced by a Brunswick court in 2019 for sexually assaulting an American pensioner, expires in September next year.
Presiding judge Uta Engemann said there was not enough evidence for a conviction and that some witnesses were unreliable.
District Attorney Christian Walters told the BBC he planned to appeal Tuesday’s ruling to the Federal Court and that until then the ruling would not be legally binding.
Brückner spent several years in Portugal’s Algarve region but moved back and forth between there and his native Germany, where he was identified as a suspect by German investigators in the Madeleine McCann case in 2020.
She was holidaying in the Algarve with her family when she disappeared from her apartment in Praia da Luz. German prosecutors are convinced she is no longer alive.
Brückner was tried in Braunschweig. That was where he last lived. Although not related to McCann’s case, his latest rape trial attracted widespread international attention when it began in February.
But over the summer, a court withdrew an arrest warrant related to the case, which some observers saw as an early sign that Brückner could be acquitted.
Brückner himself did not give evidence during the trial, but his lawyer, Friedrich Fülscher, said Monday that the acquittal was “the only correct outcome in this case” because two of the rape victims, a teenager and an elderly woman, had not been identified. said. The witnesses were unreliable.
A key witness previously told the trial that he had broken into Brückner’s home in Portugal and discovered videos of him raping a girl and a woman aged between 70 and 80.
Irish woman Hazel Behan later told the court she was sexually assaulted by a masked man who broke into her flat in Portugal in 2004 when she was 20 years old. She waived anonymity at the trial and explained that she never forgot Brückner’s bright eyes. , she said, “I felt bored out of my skull.”
Mr Behan told the court he believed he was the man who attacked him.
Prosecutors previously said one of the rape charges should be dismissed.
They have been trying to ensure that Brückner remains in preventive detention when his sentence ends next year.
But Brückner’s attorney said he also plans to challenge his 2019 rape conviction.
His acquittal in a recent trial raised questions about prosecutors’ separate case involving Madeleine McCann’s disappearance.
Legally there is no connection between the two. In handing down the not guilty verdict, the judge made it clear that “the verdict must be based on the evidence on the charges in question and should not be influenced by controversies in other cases or in the media.”
But Tuesday’s ruling could have further implications, as some of the witnesses the judge deemed unreliable were also potential witnesses in the McCann case.
The district attorney disagreed with the court’s finding that some witnesses were unreliable and told the BBC the ruling would not affect the Madeleine McCann investigation.
Their next steps will likely depend on an appeal to federal court.
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, you may find a source of help. Via BBC’s Action Line.
