(8 Oct 2024)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Braunschweig – 8 October 2024
1. People leaving courtroom
2. SOUNDBITE (German) Lisa Rust, spokesperson of the court:
“The Chamber today acquitted the defendant on all five charges. It heard a large number of witnesses as part of an extensive hearing of evidence over almost 40 trial days in order to clarify the long-ago acts, which are also alleged to have taken place abroad. However, the chamber was not able to establish the facts with the necessary certainty, i.e. without reasonable doubt, which is why the accused had to be acquitted here.”
3. Defence lawyer Friedrich Sebastian Fülscher arriving
4. Journalists
5. SOUNDBITE (German) Friedrich Sebastian Fülscher, defence lawyer:
"The verdict corresponds to what I, if you remember, 36 main trial days ago, also announced here in front of the press. It was foreseeable, at least from the point of view of the defence, that there can only be one result that corresponds to the factual and legal situation. And that is the acquittal.”
6. Photographer
7. SOUNDBITE (German) Friedrich Sebastian Fülscher, defence lawyer:
"I believe that the will, the will to prosecute and the eagerness to prosecute of the prosecutor’s office stood in the way of an objective assessment. And that is what the Chamber clearly communicated to the parties to the proceedings in its decision to revoke the arrest warrant. And we have now also seen at the end of this trial that there was an acquittal on all charges.”
8. Media outside courtroom
STORYLINE:
A German court on Tuesday acquitted a man who is also under investigation in the 2007 disappearance of British toddler Madeleine McCann in a trial on charges of unrelated sexual offenses.
The Braunschweig state court acquitted the 47-year-old German national, who has been identified by local media as Christian Brueckner, of two counts of rape and two of sexual abuse.
However, Brueckner will remain in prison another year because he is still serving a seven-year sentence for rape in a different case, German news agency dpa reported.
Brueckner had been on trial since February over offences he is alleged to have committed in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.
Defence lawyers had pointed to what they labelled a lack of evidence and witnesses who weren’t credible, and suggested he might not have been charged if he hadn’t also been a suspect in the McCann case.
"It was foreseeable, at least from the point of view of the defence, that there can only be one result that corresponds to the factual and legal situation. And that is the acquittal,” said defence lawyer Sebastian Fülscher.
Prosecutors had argued he should be given a 15-year prison sentence and kept in preventive detention once he has served it.
“The evidence we had was not enough to convict the defendant,” presiding judge Uta Engemann said, according to dpa, adding that “we were dealing with unreliable witnesses, some of whom deliberately lied to the court.”
Engemann argued that witnesses had been influenced in their statements by the media’s reporting on Brueckner, who she said had been “stylised as a sex monster and child murderer."
Prosecutors said they would appeal the ruling.
Brueckner has not been charged in the McCann case, in which he is under investigation on suspicion of murder.
He spent many years in Portugal, including in the resort of Praia da Luz around the time of Madeleine’s disappearance there in 2007. He has denied any involvement in her disappearance.
AP Video shot by Fanny Brodersen
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