Metropolitan Police-AFP
The man suspected by German authorities of murdering missing British girl Madeleine McCann has a host of previous convictions for crimes including sexual assaults of children and the rape of a pensioner.
Named Christian B. by German media, the 47-year-old with short blond hair was revealed as a suspect in the McCann case in 2020 in a dramatic development in the long-unsolved mystery.
He has yet to be charged in that case but goes on trial in Germany on Friday for two unrelated child sex offences and three counts of rape.
According to German police, Christian B. lived in the Algarve region of Portugal, where Madeleine disappeared during a family holiday, between 1995 and 2007.
They say he made a living doing odd jobs in the area and also burgled hotel rooms and holiday flats.
Police believe he was living in a white Westfalia camper van with yellow skirting at the time of the kidnapping.
A file handout picture taken in 2018 and released by Italian Carabinieri on June 5, 2020 shows Christian B. when he was arrested for drug trafficking in Italy
Speaking to Sky News in 2020, a former neighbour in Portugal said Christian B. was "always a bit angry, driving fast up and down the lane, and then one day... he just disappeared without a word".
He lived in Hanover from 2007, according to German media, and later split his time between Germany and Portugal for several more years.
At the time when he was revealed as a suspect in the McCann case, Christian B. was in prison in the northern German city of Kiel serving a sentence for drug trafficking.
He had also been convicted of the rape in 2005 of a 72-year-old woman in Praia da Luz, the same Portuguese resort where Madeleine went missing.
He is now serving out a seven-year sentence for that crime in Oldenburg, near Bremen.
Following the revelation that Christian B. could be linked to the McCann case, investigators elsewhere in Europe began looking at cold cases of missing children or teens.
Belgium reopened an investigation into the murder of German teenager Carola Titze, 16, who was found dead and mutilated in July 1996 in the resort town of De Haan on the Belgian coast.
In the Netherlands, investigators are taking a closer look at the unexplained disappearance in 1995 of Jair Soares, a seven-year-old boy.
German investigators are also examining whether Christian B. could be linked to the case of a five-year-old girl named Inga Gehricke who disappeared from the town of Schoenebeck in Saxony-Anhalt in 2015.
