Christian Brueckner has always strenuously denied having any involvement in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. But a former associate told ITV News Correspondent Sejal Karia that he is lying.

Warning: Viewers may find some details of this report distressing.

A former associate of Christian Brueckner, the prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, has told ITV News he is “100% sure” Brueckner was involved in her kidnapping.

In his first television interview, Helge Busching told me how Brueckner appeared to let slip details of his involvement in the three-year-old’s disappearance from a Portuguese hotel in 2007, describing how she “wasn’t screaming” during a conversation about the case.

Brueckner is the convicted paedophile German prosecutors say is their prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine.

Brueckner, who has strenuously denied any involvement in Madeleine’s case, is now just days away from walking free from prison, after serving a sentence for an unconnected rape conviction. He has never been charged in relation to Maddeline McCann’s disappearance.

I met Mr Busching at an undisclosed location in Europe. He is a man with a criminal past who, whilst an associate of Brueckner, was keen to tell me they were not friends.

Both German nationals operating in the Algarve, he described how they did some “business” together, from stealing solar panels and diesel, to drug dealing.

It is a past Mr Busching says he has left behind and he has now become a key witness for the German authorities. One who is convinced that Brueckner knows what really happened to Madeleine McCann.

“You believe he (Christian Brueckner) took Madeleine McCann?” I asked him.

“Yeah, yeah. I want Christian to go behind bars for this, for the case of Madeleine McCann,” he told me.

“This was him, I am 100% sure. He can say I am innocent. I know what he was doing, I saw it with my proper eyes. I know he’s a dangerous man.”

Mr Busching had never spoken on camera before. But in our meeting, he sat across from me and didn’t hesitate.

“He’s a dangerous man. A really dangerous man,” he told me.

What Mr Busching revealed was more than just a character sketch of a sexual predator. He recounted a moment that has haunted him for years.

At a festival in Spain just a year after Madeleine vanished, Mr Busching said they had a conversation about the three-year-old’s disappearance where Brueckner made the remark he says has never left him.

Helge Busching spoke of his last interactions with Christian Brueckner in 2008

“I told him I don’t understand how somebody can rob little children from a hotel,” Mr Busching recalled.

And then, he says, Brueckner answered: “She was not screaming.”

I asked Mr Busching what he thought that meant. His reply was stark.

“I was thinking, yeah, how you know this…yeah he have to do something with this.”

“He took Maddie out from this hotel. He is involved, sure.” he told me. What he heard chilled him so much that he feared asking any more questions, and he said Brueckner then left the festival suddenly that night.

Mr Busching says he left a voicemail for Scotland Yard later that same year. But his message, one of 60,000 that poured in at the time, was lost.

It was not until 2017 that detectives finally listened. He called again, this time to a dedicated hotline. Within days, police were interviewing him at length. His testimony became part of the case against Brueckner, passed to German prosecutors who would later name him their prime suspect.

Mr Busching’s evidence has been used before. At Brueckner’s rape trial in 2019. When he was convicted of attacking a 72-year-old American woman in Praia de Luz in Portugal in 2005.

In 2024 Mr Brueckner was cleared by a German court of rape and sexual abuse in an unrelated trial. The judge said there was insufficient evidence for a conviction and some of the witnesses were unreliable, including Mr Busching.

German prosecutors believe the trial wasn’t handled in the correct way and have lodged an appeal in a higher court.

Busching told me about finding a stash of disturbing videos, just a year after that rape in 2006, in Brueckner’s home, showing him violently raping two females. Some of the details are too distressing to share.

“I saw a woman, she was handcuffed,” he told me. “And some guy in all black.”

“Could you see his face?” I asked him.

“No, he had a black mask,” Mr Busching replied.

“Did the man ever take his mask off?”

“The end of the video he was sitting in the end of the bed. He was so hot, sweating, and he takes a mask off.”

“Who did you see?” I questioned.

“It was Christian Brueckner. 100%.”

When I asked if he had found any other videos, he said he saw one of a young German girl, who he suspects was 14 years old.

Mr Busching said he stumbled across the videos when he broke into Brueckner’s home in Portugal to steal diesel fuel that he was keeping inside a large tank.

A house that was just a mile away from the Ocean Club resort, where the McCanns stayed the following year.

Mr Busching says Brueckner had one speciality that he did not engage in, breaking into hotel rooms and holiday homes.

And he thinks Brueckner may have tried to burgle the McCanns’ apartment when he stumbled across Madeleine.

“Christian knows the Ocean Club very well. He was working there in the Ocean Club as a pool boy. And I think Christian, I think, was thinking, okay, go in one apartment and take some stuff from this apartment. (But) this time, he don’t take baggage, luggage, he takes her.”

Now, with Brueckner’s release looming, Mr Busching says he feels let down by the German justice system.

Helge Busching describes Brueckner as a ‘really dangerous man’ and says he ‘does not understand’ his release

“A big criminal man. To let him go as a free man. I don’t understand this… Now I know there will come out a really dangerous man.”

He told me he no longer has faith in German prosecutors and wants British police to take back control of the Madeleine McCann investigation.

“I don’t have any more confidence in the German justice,” he said. “The best way is the English police will take the case of Madeleine McCann and Christian Brueckner.”

Christian Brueckner has always strenuously denied having any involvement in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Mr Busching insists Brueckner is lying.

“I don’t believe him. No. Christian is a big, big liar. He knows what I saw. He knows it.”

He may soon walk free from jail but the shadow of suspicion will follow Brueckner. And 18 years after she vanished, Madeleine McCann’s fate is still unknown.

ITV News contacted Mr Brueckner’s lawyer for comment.