A woman who was raped at knifepoint by a masked man in Portugal 20 years ago has told a German court trying the main suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann how she had feared for her life and had to shut down her emotions to deal with the ordeal.
Behan came forward to offer the account of her ordeal to British police in 2020 after learning of Brückner’s conviction in 2019 of the rape of an elderly American tourist after noticing the striking similarities in the method of the attacker in the woman’s case and hers. She described how she was repeatedly raped, whipped and tied up in her apartment, filming the attack on a camera he had set up on the television in her room. “I thought ‘why would you want a video of this?”
He appeared to listen to her account, his chin resting on the fingers of his left hand for the majority of it, but showed no reaction. They have continued to pursue the case, going so far as to say that they did not believe McCann was alive any more, but have not gone into any detail as to why.