The person accused of a string of intercourse crimes has been placed on trial just because he’s additionally a suspect for the unrelated disappearance of Madeleine McCann, his lawyer has informed a decide.
Christian B, as he’s recognized underneath German privateness legal guidelines, is the sufferer of prejudiced prosecutors and an amateurish police investigation, the court docket heard.
Defence lawyer Friedrich Fulscher mentioned: “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 decide to acquit the German drifter, who denies three rapes and two youngster intercourse assaults.
He mentioned Christian B, 47, ought to by no means have been charged with the offences, mentioned to have been dedicated between 2000 and 2017 alongside Portugal’s Algarve coast the place he had been dwelling 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,” mentioned Mr Fulscher.
German prosecutors have mentioned they consider Christian B kidnapped Madeleine McCann, the three-year-old British woman who vanished from her household’s rented vacation residence in Praia da Luz in 2007, and so they consider she is useless.
The suspect has not been charged with Madeleine’s disappearance and denies any involvement.
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Madeleine McCann. Pic: Handout/ PA
His trial in Braunschweig on unrelated intercourse offences started in February and a verdict is predicted on Tuesday.
In his closing speech his lawyer Mr Fulscher accused two predominant prosecution witnesses of mendacity about video tapes they claimed to have seen allegedly displaying Christian B raping an aged lady and a lady of about 14 in his rented dwelling in Portugal.
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Pic: DPA/AP
And the lawyer prompt former Irish vacation rep Hazel Behan had been mistaken to determine Christian B as the person who raped her in her room in 2004.
She had described her attacker as having a particular cross-like mark on his proper thigh, however he had no such marking, the decide was informed.
Ms Behan could have been influenced by media tales 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 docket heard.
Christian B is serving a seven-year sentence for the rape of an American lady at her villa in Praia da Luz in 2005. He might be free of that sentence within the spring.
In a closing speech final week the chief prosecutor Ute Lindemann described Christian B as “a sadistic psychopath” and urged the decide to jail him for 15 years for the 5 intercourse crimes for which he’s on trial.
