The legal team defending Madeleine McCann prime suspect Christian Brueckner in his trial for unrelated sex offences is attempting to have a key piece of evidence thrown out of court, arguing that investigators broke international law in obtaining it.
German police were handed Brueckner's hard-drive by an unnamed female witness in Portugal containing sickening cartoons allegedly penned by Brueckner.
Now Brueckner's team is demanding that the Regional Court of Braunschweig does not officially admit the hard-drive as evidence.
Brueckner's lawyer Friedrich Fülscher said: 'This is simply not allowed.The German police can't simply go and secure evidence in another country without any authorisation.
'The Portuguese authorities were not even informed of this. It is as if the German police just went to England and started carrying out a police investigation there and then seizing evidence and flying it back toGermany. It's outrageous!'
Brueckner's team is demanding that the Regional Court of Braunschweig does not officially admit the hard-drive as evidence. Pictured in April
Inboxes of the email accounts had been completely deleted for the first half of 2007, which includes the time when Madeleine 'Maddie' McCann (pictured) disappeared
Brueckner's lawyer Friedrich Fülscher said: 'The German police can't simply go and secure evidence in another country without any authorisation'
Details of the hard-drive were provided yesterday in court by Titus Stampa, a detective commissioner for the Federal Criminal Police (BKA), Germany's equivalent of the FBI.
Alongside details of the hard-drive, Stampa revealed that Brueckner had had three email accounts.
Two of them were used to send p*rnographic pictures, including of himself and his erect penis.
Stampa and his colleagues at the Federal Criminal Police (BKA), applied toMicrosoftIreland in 2017 to try to secure access to the account, which after undergoing extensive procedures they eventually were granted in 2018.
Here they found that the inboxes of these accounts had been completely deleted for the first half of 2007, which includes the time when Madeleine 'Maddie' McCann disappeared.
But when they checked the accounts' outboxes, they discovered that Brueckner had sent a multitude of files with obscene photos, including photos of himself with an erect penis.
Moreover, it also included various versions of two stories, the 'Mother / Daughter' story, and the 'Zofen story'.
The first deals with a mother and daughter who are captured, transported in a van to a farmhouse, tortured and brutally raped.
The second deals with children who decide to take their revenge on a paedophile who has abused them.
The prosecution argue that all found this story on a USB stick which was found during a police search in 2016 on Brueckner's dilapidated box factory site in Neuwegesleben.
Convicted rapist Brueckner (pictured), 47, is accused of three rapes and two sex assaults said to have been carried out on Portugal's Algarve coast in a period from 2000 to 2017
A view of the block of apartments from where Madeleine McCann disappeared in 2007, in Praia da Luz, in Portugal's Algarve coast
But the defence has consistently tried to prevent this story from being heard in court, arguing that the police search was unauthorised and therefore evidence secured there is inadmissible.
This Tuesday, the court heard from the policewoman who had informed her colleagues about a dead dog on Breuckner's premises, prompting a police search.
Here under intense grilling from Judge Ute Insa Engemann, the policewoman Katharina Schmidt, 47, admitted that she had been on Brueckner's premises without any permission.
And she even admitted that she knew it was not allowed to be there, or take photos, or send these on to police to prompt an investigation.
Given all of this, it had seemed that the prosecution then had no chance of ever revealing details of this story in court.
But instead, by focusing on Brueckner's emails, the prosecution yesterday indirectly managed to have the harrowing outline of these stories mentioned in court.
When it came to the third email, however, Stampa said he was not authorised to talk about it as it concerned theMadeleine McCanninvestigation.Bruckner has always denied any involvement in Madeleine's disappearance.
Speaking outside the courtroom this morning, one of the members of Brueckner's defence team, Phillip Marquort, said: 'You have to remember that the file with this story on was an RTF file, and these files do not identify the author.'
'So whatever has been written about what happened in court yesterday, this facts remain, and also even Mr Stampa admitted in court yesterday that they have no way of knowing if my client wrote the story or not because RTF files do not record the author.'
The trial continues.
