Sedan – German police investigating the 2007 disappearance of the British girl Madeleine McCann in Portugal ended their search for a landscaped plot on the outskirts of Hannover in northern Germany, prosecutors said Thursday.
Investigators left Wednesday night, a spokeswoman for the Braunschweig prosecutor’s office said. She did not elaborate on the specific reason for the search or if the police found anything related to her investigation.
Police began searching the garden on Monday, but prosecutors only said activities at the site were related to their investigation.
BIMMER FABIAN / REUTERS
Madeleine was 3 years old at the time of her 2007 disappearance from an apartment while her family was on vacation in the coastal town of Praia da Luz, in the Portuguese Algarve region.
German authorities said last month that they had identified a 43-year-old German citizen as a suspect in the case And they’re investigating him on suspicion of murder.
The suspect, who is currently in prison in Germany, spent many years in Portugal, including in Praia da Luz, at the time of Madeleine’s disappearance, and has two previous convictions for “sexual contact with girls,” authorities said.
Authorities have not released the suspect’s name, but the German media has widely identified him as Christian B.
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He was last registered living in Germany in the city of Brunswick, which is about 40 miles from Hannover. Between 2013 and 2015, the suspect spent time in both Portugal and Germany. He ran a kiosk in Brunswick and also lived in Hannover for several years, the German dpa news agency reported.
On the garden plot, investigators cut trees, removed the soil, searched the facility with a sniffer dog, and removed parts of the foundation of an old shack from the soil that was once there, dpa reported. A man on a neighboring plot told the news agency that the garden had not been used in the past two years.
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