The convicted sex offender Christian B has been released from prison after a prosecutor failed to find enough evidence to charge him in the Madeleine McCann case.
The German drifter, accused but not charged over the toddler’s abduction, walked free at the end of an unrelated sentence for rape.
Christian B, who cannot be fully identified under German privacy laws, was driven away from Sehnde prison near Hannover by his lawyer Friedrich Fulscher.
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As part of his release conditions, he’s been fitted with an electronic ankle tag, has had to surrender his passport, and register his permanent address with probation officers.
Another of his lawyers, Philipp Marquort, said: “This is an attempt by the public prosecutor’s office to keep him in a kind of pre-trial detention where they would have access to him at any time. We will not accept that.”
It was not known where he was heading, or who might help him adjust to a new life as the only currently known suspect in the world’s most notorious unsolved child abduction mystery.
Prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters, who leads the Madeleine investigation, believes Christian B, 49, abducted and murdered the three-year-old during a family holiday in Portugal in 2007.
The suspect, who has convictions for child sex abuse, theft, drug trafficking and forgery, denies any involvement.
Madeleine vanished from her bed in a rented apartment as her parents and their friends dined nearby at the hotel complex in Praia da Luz.
Read more on Sky News:
The chequered history of Christian B
The hit-and-run Madeleine theory
‘A risk of reoffending’
Mr Wolters told Sky News recently he had “almost” enough evidence to charge the suspect, but could not justify arresting him and stopping him from being freed.
He said: “We do consider him very dangerous and assume there is a risk of reoffending.”
He said he had not ruled out the chance of charging Christian B: “At the moment, we still have lines of investigation we are pursuing, and we hope we may gain more evidence or indications.
“If that happens, our situation would, of course, improve, and we would prefer to go to court with that stronger position.”
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Rape conviction
Christian B, who flitted between Germany and Portugal, has served seven years for the rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Praia da Luz two years before Madeleine vanished.
He is expected to appear in a German court next month to face a charge of using insulting behaviour towards a female prison warder. A conviction could put him back in jail.
He also faces a possible retrial after the prosecutor’s appeal against his acquittal last year on unrelated rape and child sex allegations.
Scotland Yard detectives, who failed to charge anyone in their own investigation, revealed this week they had “asked Christian B to answer their questions, but he refused, as he has with their German and Portuguese colleagues.
His lawyers dismissed it as an illegal request because investigators had shared none of the prosecution files with him.
‘Why should we believe he will stop?’
According to the prosecutor, the evidence against Christian B in the Madeleine case is circumstantial; his mobile phone was nearby her apartment at the time she vanished, he was a convicted child sex abuser, he had allegedly confessed to a friend, and he had re-registered his car the day after.
There is no forensic evidence to link the suspect to the abduction, and after 18 years, the chances of finding it must be remote.
German crime analyst Mark T Hofmann told Sky News: “I’m a big believer in second chances, but I’m not that much of a big believer in 10th chances. So if you commit a crime, and you do it again and again and again and again, then you need to ask yourself, ‘why should we believe that he will stop now?’
“I wish, and I hope, that also he realises that he can maybe now live a different life anonymously in some place and hopefully stop committing crimes.”
Madeleine’s parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, from Leicestershire, cling to the hope their daughter might still be found alive, in the absence of any evidence they are aware of to show she is dead.
