A woman who claims she was raped at knifepoint by the prime suspect in Madeleine McCann’s disappearance has told a court she will never forget her attacker’s eye which “pierced my skull”.
Christian Brückner is accused of five sexual assaults on women aged 10 to 80 in Portugal between 2000 and 2017, including the rape of 40-year-old Hazel Behan in June 2004. Giving evidence at the trial, Hazel Behan told the court: “I believe this man is the man who attacked me.”
She sat just a few meters away from Bruckner, who looked on expressionlessly. Behan, an executive from Ireland and mother of three, told the court on the second and final day of testimony, which lasted more than 10 hours, that she still carried Scars from the attack in Praia da Rocha, where she worked as a holiday representative.
Bruckner, 47, was named by German police in 2020 as the main suspect in the disappearance of British toddler Madeleine McCann (and was not the focus of the trial), and at one point judge Uta Engemann asked him to leave near the judge’s bench so she could examine his attacker’s eyes after Behan said she would “never forget” them.
“When you’re with a person in a situation like this, you can’t see anything else in that person except their eyes, that’s the only thing you can remember. They drilled into me Skull. I’ll never forget it,” she said. She added that she believed the impact of the attacker’s eyes was exacerbated by the fact that he was dressed entirely in black.
“They were so blue… everything was so dark… they were like lights, they were so bright. I just knew them,” she said.
She said the attack caused her to suffer from recurring post-traumatic stress disorder and frequent panic attacks. The court was shown pictures of the scars still on the backs of her legs from being tied to the breakfast bar with ropes during the prolonged attack on the flat where she lived.
She also said she was still bleeding from injuries sustained in the violent attack.
The attacker wore a mask, a bodysuit with a thickness of about 60 denier from head to toe and leather or faux leather gloves, she said, adding that only his eyes were visible.
He spoke to her in English, which she said had a German accent. Behan’s testimony comes at what prosecutors call a critical moment in a trial that began in February and is expected to last into the fall, hearing from about 40 witnesses and a range of experts. Bruckner was sentenced to seven years in prison for the 2005 rape of an American tourist in the Algarve.
He will be released late next year.
Behan described how she came forward in 2020 to tell British police her ordeal in response to a call from the Metropolitan Police, which handled the McCann case. The appeal included Bruckner’s official police identification photo and asked witnesses to contact them.
She said seeing the photo and the description of his appearance made her sick and later caused her to vomit. She later learned Bruckner had been convicted of raping an elderly American tourist in 2019 and shared with Irish, British and German police the striking similarities between the woman’s attacker’s modus operandi and hers.
Over two days, Behan told the court in detail how she was repeatedly raped, whipped and tied up in her apartment, the ordeal filmed by her attacker on a camera he mounted above the TV in her room. experience. The attacker threatened her: “If you scream, I’ll kill you.” At one point she said she feared she would be beheaded after he swung a knife at her.
Bruckner, who denies the sexual assault charges or any involvement in McCann’s disappearance, sat a few meters away from Behan. Wearing a gray linen jacket with elbow pads and a white shirt, he leaned back in his chair for much of his testimony, often resting his chin on his left hand but appearing to show no emotion.
The trial continues.
