New information is emerging about the lead suspect in the long-running Madeleine McCann case, with German police claiming Christian Brueckner had an email account containing messages "related to the killing" of the child.
Brueckner, a convicted paedophile and rapist, allegedly had a Hotmail account opened in 2007 which police believe links him to the case.
The new information was disclosed by senior detective Titus Stampa at Germany's Braunschweig Regional Court on Wednesday (local time).
According to the Mirror, Stampa referred to the Hotmail as the "murder account" in court but declined to specify what the emails related to Madeleine contained.
Officers also found a second email account where Brueckner had exchanged child abuse imagery, Stampa said.
In his address to the court, Stampa said authorities were given access to the Hotmail accounts by Microsoft in 2019, the Mirror reported.
Stampa said Brueckner had tried to wipe away "many emails" exchanged with fellow paedophiles.
One email not related to Madeleine spoke of a "very detailed story about a five-year-old girl and her mother who are kidnapped and taken away in a van", Stampa said.
Bruckner is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for the violent rape of a 72-year-old woman and has continued to deny any involvement in Madeleine's disappearance. He's currently on trial for a string of alleged attacks - unrelated to Madeleine - between 2000 and 2017.
Prosecutors named Brueckner as an official suspect in the McCann case in 2020, saying they had fresh evidence. However, investigators have repeatedly declined to say what that evidence is.
Last year, a reservoir in Portugal was cordoned off about 50km from where Madeleine, who was 3 years old at the time, went missing in 2007.
However, after a large operation using sniffer dogs and radar equipment, investigators conceded there was "no compelling evidence" in the lake, The Sun reported at the time.
Madeleine disappeared from her bed at the family's holiday apartment in a Praia da Luz resort while her parents were out eating 50 metres away, in what remains one of the world's most high-profile missing persons cases.
