Christian Brueckner was working at Ocean Club restaurant where Madeleine McCann's parents and 'The Tapas Seven' dined nightly when he came up with plot to abduct and sell her to a childless couple, claims Brit

The chief suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann worked at the same Algarve resort that she vanished from in 2007, it has been claimed to MailOnline.

According to British expat Ken Ralphs - who knew Christian Brueckner at the time through acquaintances - the German criminal, 47, was working cash-in-hand at the Ocean Club tapas bar frequented by Kate and Gerry McCann, Madeleine's parents.

Mr Ralphs maintains that Brueckner plotted with another man to abduct a young girl to then sell her to a couple unable to have children of their own.

The 59-year-old believes the pair went through with their plan and kidnapped Madeleine from her family's hotel room on that fateful night in May 2007, while Kate and Gerry were in the Ocean Club restaurant with their group of friends who later became known in the press as 'The Tapas Seven'.

However, speaking to MailOnline, Mr Ralphs said he suspects Brueckner and his co-conspirators lost their nerve when they saw the extensive media coverage of the case, which highlighted her distinctive eyes - making her impossible to sell.

The Brit - who left the UK in 2004, returning intermittently - says he went to police in both the UK and in Portugal in the immediate aftermath of Madeleine's disappearance, and again when Brueckner was officially named a suspect in 2020. 

In both countries, he says he told police about Brueckner's alleged plot, and that the drifter had been working at the Ocean Club restaurant - something that was also reported in the past by a German documentary in 2020.

Since then, Mr Ralphs says, he has received conflicting accounts from police in both countries over whether the information he provided was passed on or investigated.

The chief suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann - Christian Brueckner - worked at the same Algarve resort that she vanished from in 2007, it has been claimed to MailOnline by someone who knew him when he lived in Portugal's Algarve region at the time

Madeleine McCann (pictured) went missing on May 3, 2007 at the age of just three. She has never been found. German criminal Christian Brueckner has been named by German prosecutors as their chief suspect in her disappearance 

According to British expat Ken Ralphs (pictured speaking to Sky News earlier this month) - who knew Christian Brueckner at the time through acquaintances - the German criminal was working cash-in-hand at the Ocean Club restaurant frequented by Kate and Gerry McCann, Madeleine's parents. They were at the bar on the night Madeleine vanished

After 13 years of fruitless investigations, Brueckner was named by German prosecutors in 2020 as the chief suspect in the notorious case of the missing girl.

Although he has been convicted and charged with a string of other sex crimes, the 47-year-old has never been charged in connection with Madeleine's case and has denied having any involvement in her disappearance.

Brueckner is known to have lived in southern Portugal's Algarve region, near Praia da Luz, where Madeleine vanished on May 3, 2007 - aged just three.

He was part of the region's drifter community, and spent 12 years pursuing a bohemian lifestyle in and around Praia da Luz at two houses, one in the small town and one two miles away between the neighbouring town of Lagos.

It has also since come to light that he was a drug dealer, and was convicted on unrelated counts of sexual abuse and drug trafficking. He is currently in a German prison for the rape of a 72-year-old woman in her Praia da Luz home in 2005.

Mr Ralphs - a former community champion in Greater Manchester - himself fled from the UK Portugal with his wife in 2004 when a police blunder led to his name being handed to suspected criminals.

This was after Mr Ralphs had given police information on a gangland murder in which the suspects were cleared, resulting in death threats made against him and putting his family in danger.

After spending time in witness protection, Mr Ralphs and his wife decided to leave their life in the UK behind - where he had previously been an elected representative of a local political party. He had also worked in partnership with Manchester Police to fight crime under the Crime and Disorder Act.

After being awarded over £130,000 in compensation over the police blunder, the couple hid out in the Algarve in a campervan, moving from place to place, and - like Brueckner - temporarily became part of the drifter community in the region.

It was during Brueckner's time in the Algarve that Mr Ralphs said he met the German through another man, who MailOnline is choosing not to name for legal reasons.

For the purposes of this article, the man will be referred to as John.

According to Mr Ralphs, Brueckner and John set up a hidden encampment in Carrapateira - 10 miles from Praia da Luz - where John stayed with his wife and two young children in a tee-pee tent.

John was struggling, Mr Ralphs said, and so he and his wife Hazel would often take food to their camp so they and their young children could eat.

While Mr Ralphs said he had seen Brueckner at other locations in the region since he had arrived in 2004 - at car boot sales, in town centres, or in other camping spots on the region's beaches - he met him properly for the first time through John.

One night in April 2007, around a week before Madeleine vanished, Mr Ralphs said he and John were sitting around a campfire drinking some beers together having spent the evening with their families and, earlier in the night, Brueckner.

After Brueckner left the site, and after others had turned in, Mr Ralphs said John revealed to him that Brueckner had spoken about his plan to kidnap a young girl and sell her to a family - suggesting it as a way to make some quick money.

'We sat by the fire until the early hours of the morning,' Mr Ralphs recalled to MailOnline, 'and that's when [John] started to cry and confess.'

The ex pat said he initially tried to comfort an 'obviously depressed' John, before John asked Mr Ralphs if he could tell him a 'secret'.

Madeleine McCann vanished from her family's hotel room on that fateful night in May 2007, while her parents Kate and Gerry were in the Ocean Club restaurant (pictured) with their group of friends who later became known in the press as 'The Tapas Seven'

Pictured: The holiday complex where the McCanns were staying in Portugal's Algarve region in May 2007, when their three-year-old daughter vanished without a trace

Madeleine parents Kate and Gerry McCann are seen during an interview in 2017

'[John] told me Christian was planning to take a child from Praia da Luz,' Mr Ralphs said. 'He then clarified it was not ransom, but that it was to take a child to sell to a German couple who could not have children of their own.

'He assured me the child would not be harmed,' Mr Ralphs said, adding that John 'told me Christian knew many people who will pay good money for a child who cannot give birth, and that the child would be taken from a rich family with more than one child [of their own] so the parents would not grieve as badly.'

After this shocking revelation, Mr Ralphs said he pressed John for more information.

He said John explained Brueckner 'worked at the [Ocean Club] restaurant, and that he had been planning events for months.

'He said Christian Knows the place inside out and was very clever and he knows what he is doing,' Mr Ralphs added.

Recalling that night, Mr Ralphs told MailOnline that he set about trying to dissuade John from going through with the plot with Brueckner, warning him to not fall in with criminals.

At the time, Mr Ralphs was earning money by fixing satellites on the caravans belonging to other people in the off-grid Algarve community, and offered to train John so that they could work together and help him out of the dire situation.

However, Mr Ralphs said he is not sure if he got through to John. Despite his best efforts to get more information out of him about Brueckner's alleged plot, he said John eventually went to bed, and they didn't speak about it again.

A week later, Mr Ralphs was back in the UK briefly visiting his father in Stockport when the news of Madeleine's disappearance broke on the news.

'I was sat in my dad's house having a cup of tea when it came on the news - the breaking news when the new came out,' an emotional Mr Ralphs recalled. 'First thing I said was "oh for f*** sake". My dad asked what's the matter, and I told my dad.'

Mr Ralphs said the news left him in tears, and that his father persuaded him to go to the police - despite his past experiences.

Choosing not to return to police in Manchester after his experience in 2004 that caused him to flee to Portugal, he acted on his father's advice and travelled up to Workington Police station and delivered a statement to Cumbria Police.

Mr Ralphs said he handed officers there a hand-drawn map of where the tee-pee camp was hidden in Portugal and requested they send it to Portuguese officials involved in the search for Madeleine. He also told officers that John had told him Brueckner was working at Ocean Club, he said.

On his return to Portugal days later, Mr Ralphs went straight to the site of the tee-pee camp - only to find that it had been destroyed by fire - all but a bamboo cage.

An aerial image shows where the McCanns were staying, relative to the Ocean Bar they ate at on the night Madeleine vanished in May 3, 2007

'What I got back I wanted to see whether [John and his family] were still at the camp, to try and establish whether he had been involved. If he was still about, I could have questioned him, but he wasn't there,' Mr Ralphs said.

'It had all been destroyed by a fire - everything had been gutted, totally burnt-out. All that remained was a four-or-five-foot cage, which I found unusual, because the cage wasn't there before when [John] gave his confession.'

After finding the destroyed camp site, Mr Ralphs searched the other Algarve beaches John was known to frequent.

He eventually found another mutual acquaintance, a Frenchman who was also part of the drifter community and who MailOnline is not naming, at Amado beach - a popular spot around 10 miles from Praia da Luz.

The Frenchman told Mr Ralphs that John had left him with his pet dog after leaving for Africa. This was surprising, Mr Ralphs said, on account of John having no money.

Mr Ralphs said he has never seen or spoken to John again, but told MailOnline that the missing drifter was tracked down by the police.

According to the ex pat, when police did catch up with John, he told the cops he had never met the expat or his wife, despite there being several other witnesses to them having known each other during their time in Portugal.

Mr Ralphs told Sky News earlier this month that 'police told me someone had made contact with my friend abroad and he had denied knowing me, but I have a dozen witnesses who will say that he's lying.

'I guess he just didn't want to be interviewed by the police.'

Mr Ralphs also said he spoke to two GNR (Portugal's National Republican Guard) officials and gave them the same information he had given to Cumbria police back in the UK. He said the officials told them they were aware of John, but doubted he could be involved on account of him having a family of his own.

As the story of Madeleine's disappearance hit the front pages, the world's media descended on Praia da Luz.

Mr Ralphs himself said he went down to the Ocean Club resort around that time as investigations were underway, and saw police combing the area.

Nearby, he said, he encountered Brueckner wearing an apron.

Mr Ralphs said he was 'gobsmacked' to see Brueckner in Praia da Luz, even as the media and investigators were working in the small Algarve town. 

'He was working at the Ocean Bar illegally,' being paid under the table, Mr Ralphs claimed. 'This man [Christian] was standing there in his restaurant pinny still working for them illegally at the restaurant - which could have put further people at risk.'

By working there, Mr Ralphs suggests, Brueckner would have had access to the guest book ledger - something that Kate McCann would go on to express her concerns over in the wake of her daughter's disappearance.

In her book, Madeleine's mother made reference to a block booking being jotted down and how staff were able to read that their children would be alone.

Brueckner was part of the region's drifter community, and spent 12 years pursuing a bohemian lifestyle in and around Praia da Luz at two houses, one in the small town and one two miles away between the neighbouring town of Lagos

Pictured: Brueckner's campervan which he lived in during some of the years he spent in the Algarve, living in the region's drifter community

She wrote: 'It wasn't until a year later, when I was combing through the Portuguese files, that I discovered that the note requesting our block booking was written in a staff message book, which sat on a desk at the pool reception for most of the day.

'To my horror I saw that, no doubt in all innocence and to explain why she was bending the rules a bit, the receptionist had written the reason for our request... we wanted to eat close to our apartments as we were leaving our young children alone there and checking on them intermittently.'

In the same 2011 book, 'Madeleine – our daughter's disappearance and the continuing search for her' Kate McCann voiced her fears of foreign paedophiles.

She wrote: 'Night after night, I read of depraved individuals, British paedophiles, Portuguese paedophiles, Spanish, Dutch and German paedophiles and the horrific crimes they committed.'

According to reports at the time, all employees of the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz were interviewed by police during the investigation into Madeleine's disappearance.

However, Mr Ralphs suggests that if Brueckner was working at the restaurant off the books, he could have been missed by investigators.

Mr Ralphs said that he repeatedly raised his concerns about Brueckner with both the British and Portuguese police, but has long been frustrated with their investigation.

In addition to going to police in the UK and Portugal in 2007, Mr Ralphs said he reinitiated contact again in 2020 - when Brueckner was officially named as a suspect by German prosecutors. He said he was in disbelief that it had taken so long.

But when he contacted police in 2020, he was told by officers in both the UK and Portugal that they didn't have his original statement from 2007.

To this day, he is unsure if anything he told the police in 2007 has been used by the police in their investigation into Madeleine's whereabouts.

On a number of occasions, he has been in contact with police officers in both the UK and Portugal, and has communicated with Scotland Yard and Operation Grange - the Metropolitan Police's special investigation into the case.

MailOnline has seen communication between Mr Ralphs and the British investigators, in which he frequently expresses his frustration.

Christian Brueckner was named chief suspect in Madeleine's disappearance in 2020

He is not the only person to have known Brueckner who has claimed they were ignored when raising concerns about the German.

Last year, it was revealed that a German man named Helge B. approached Scotland Yard in 2008, suspected Brueckner's involvement.

Speaking to the German tabloid Bild, Helge said: 'I called Scotland Yard in 2008, ringing the Maddie hotline. I told them I know someone who has something to do with it and gave them his name. They noted my personal details, my telephone number, but nothing happened. Nothing! They never even rang me back. 

'I thought to myself: I guess they'll be in touch at some point.'

What's more, other past friends of Brueckner's have pointed the finger at him.

Speaking to The Telegraph in 2020, Austrian Michael Tatschl - who was friends with the German since 2000 when they lived in Portugal - said he was certain Brueckner was the one behind Madeleine's suspected abduction.

'I know he did it,' Tatschl told the newspaper at the time. 

'I was living with him at the time. He was my best friend and he was definitely a pervert and more than capable of snatching a child, for sexual kicks or money.

'I was sure it was him the minute the police came to find me in Austria.

'They were very clear with me from the first minute. They said 'we are investigating Maddie McCann and Christian Brueckner' and I told them I knew it already.

'I was convinced it was him,' Tatschl added.

And in an interview with the Mail On Sunday in 2021, Brueckner's ex-girlfriend claimed he admitted being close to the McCann's apartment on May 3, 2007.

Nakscije Miftari recalled Brueckner falling silent when the subject of Madeleine's abduction was raised by friends during a party in early 2014 at their flat in Braunschweig, northern Germany.

'I remember he made no answer to the question. After they went, I asked about Maddie as I did not know anything about her,' she said.

'I asked him about it and he said, 'I know about Maddie, I was near the hotel at the time. I was living in the area at the time. I am not going to say anything more. I am not a stupid guy, I am a businessman.'

Mr Ralph's claim that John told him Brueckner was plotting the kidnap to make money also tracks with past comments from another ex-girlfriend.

Speaking to The Mirror in 2020, a British ex-girlfriend of the German's said Brueckner's only passion - besides cars - was making money.

'Other people get joy out of films, music, socialising, that sort of thing,' she said at the time. 'But for [Brueckner], if there was no money to be made out of something, then there was no point doing it.'

Mr Ralphs's claim to the MailOnline is also not the first time it has been reported that Brueckner worked at the resort in Praia da Luz.

According to a 2020 documentary by German TV channel SAT.1, Brueckner regularly carried out 'repair work' as a maintenance man at Ocean Club.

The evidence gathered for the programme showed Brueckner to be 'very familiar' with the resort on the Algarve, Portugal, and surrounding areas. 

Pictured: A view of the Ocean Bar in Praia da Luz

Like those who knew Brueckner from the past, Mr Ralphs also believes the German was capable of kidnapping a child - but suspects he did not act alone.

He is of the belief that it was Brueckner who planned the kidnap, and that it was John who entered the McCann's hotel room to take her from the resort, before the pair went to a third person's house to wait out the initial search operation.

However, once the group realised the media attention the case was getting, Mr Ralphs fears they had no choice but to 'dispose' of the youngster. 

'John did tell me that the child wouldn't be harmed, so in the back of my mind there's a possibility she could still be alive and she was sold,' he said.

'But in theory, when she was taken back [to a nearby location], I believe she could have been disposed of. When the media identified the mark in her eye, she became a liability in my opinion - and therefore [the group] wouldn't have been able to sell her.'

Brueckner appeared in court last week on a string of separate charges in Germany.

He is alleged to have committed the offences in Portugal between 2000 and 2017, unrelated to the disappearance of Madeleine.

On Friday it was announced by his lawyer that he won't respond to the charges.

'The defendant is using his right to remain silent,' defense lawyer Friedrich Fülscher told the Braunschweig state court, German news agency dpa reported. Fülscher added that he expects his client to be acquitted. 

'He has called the evidence in the indictment "abysmal".'

The trial opened a week ago but was quickly adjourned on its first day after Fülscher filed a challenge against a lay judge on the panel hearing the case, who was alleged once to have spread a call to kill former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on social media. Prosecutors joined that challenge.

The judge was removed from the case and now faces an investigation herself on suspicion of making a public call to commit crimes.

Recalling his first impressions of Brueckner when he first met him in 2006 - a year before Madeleine vanished - Mr Ralphs said: 'He was a good looking lad. He was slick, his hair was combed back, nice and tidy. He looked very clean. 

'He spoke very well - posh English. He seemed very educated,' he added. 'I didn't have any reason to think he was the monster I've since learned him to be.

'He's a monster in disguise,' he said.

Christian Brueckner arrives at the start of his trial unrelated to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, at Braunschweig district court, in Brunswick, Germany, on February 16, 2024

Mr Ralphs still lives in Portugal in a house with his wife, and raises horses on their land

MailOnline reached out to the Luz Ocean Club, Scotland Yard, Cumbria police and German prosecutors for comment.

Scotland Yard said it had nothing to add, and Cumbria police said it had no record of Mr Ralphs's statement from 2007.

German prosecutors refused to comment on the claims. 

As of Thursday, MailOnline has received no response from Luz Ocean Club after contacting the establishment on February 23.