Christian B<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n
Mr Ralphs, Christian and their mutual friend, a foreigner who cannot be named for legal reasons, were all part of a nomadic, bohemian community living – for different reasons – off-grid in isolated spots in southwest Portugal.<\/p>\n
After a short drive off-road, Mr Ralphs took me along a track to a clearing in the woods about 20 miles from Praia da Luz, the beachside village from where Madeleine disappeared in May 2007.<\/p>\n
\ufeff<\/span> <\/p>\n
“It’s fenced off now, probably privately owned,” explained Mr Ralphs, as we stood in the shadow of several towering eucalyptus trees.<\/p>\n
“But 17 years ago my friend and his family were living in a teepee here and me and my wife used to bring them food.<\/p>\n
“Christian knew the guy was vulnerable and wanted to travel abroad, but he couldn’t leave because he couldn’t afford the air tickets.”<\/p>\n
Mr Ralphs said he told his friend not to get involved in the plot and offered to help him financially when he returned from a trip he was about to make to the UK.<\/p>\n
“I said you can’t get involved in kidnapping a person for ransom, that’s ridiculous, then he explained – ‘no, it’s not like that’. Christian had a customer, a buyer lined up, a German couple who couldn’t have children.”<\/p>\n
‘I showed police secret map’<\/strong><\/p>\nA week later, Mr Ralphs was back in the UK when he heard the news that Madeleine, aged three, had vanished without a trace from her family’s rented holiday apartment.<\/p>\n
He told me that within three hours he had driven from his father’s home to a police station in Workington, Cumbria, and reported what he knew.<\/p>\n
“I said to the police, here’s the secret map of how you get to this point in the woods here. I said that must be sent immediately to the Portuguese police.”<\/p>\n
On his return to the Algarve he went to his local police station and repeated his story, but said he was told Portuguese detectives knew nothing about it.<\/p>\n
He found his friend had disappeared, his teepee tent burned, and there was no sign of Christian B. He never saw either of them again.<\/p>\n
Mr Ralphs added: “The GNR [local police] asked me, ‘have you made your statement to the British police’? I said, ‘yeah’ and they said, ‘well, don’t worry, go home. If they need to contact you, they will’. And of course, over the years nobody contacted me.”<\/p>\n
In 2020, when Christian B was publicly identified as the Madeleine suspect, Mr Ralphs recognised him from media photographs and again contacted the police.<\/p>\n
Mr Ralphs was interviewed by Portuguese detectives, though he still doesn’t know what part his evidence has played in the investigation.<\/p>\n
He said: “They 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 police.”<\/p>\n
Mr Ralphs has had contact with Scotland Yard detectives and late last year sent a detailed statement to the German prosecutor now leading the Madeleine investigation.<\/p>\n
The prosecutor, Hans Christian Wolters, told Sky News he had passed the statement to German investigators.<\/p>\n
\n
\n<\/div>
Missing Madeleine McCann<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n
‘He normally parked in the bushes where he was hidden’<\/strong><\/p>\nChristian B, who cannot be fully identified under German privacy laws, is still the main suspect in Madeleine’s disappearance but has not been charged. He denies any involvement.<\/p>\n
He is currently serving a seven-year sentence in a German prison for the rape of an elderly American woman, a crime he committed in Praia da Luz in 2005.<\/p>\n
Mr Ralphs said he knew Christian in the months before Madeleine vanished because they both used to park their camper vans on Barranco beach at the end of a long, rocky track.<\/p>\n
Mr Ralphs and his wife had left the UK when police mistakenly exposed him after he had passed on information about a gangland murder.<\/p>\n
He successfully sued Greater Manchester Police, pulled out of a witness protection plan and disappeared into an itinerant life in Portugal.<\/p>\n
When German police appealed for information about the then unnamed suspect in 2020 they released a photograph of Christian B’s yellow and white camper van parked on Barranco beach near its eastern cliffs.<\/p>\n
“I think Christian took that picture to show his friends back in Germany, a tourist snap,” Mr Ralphs told me as we wandered the beach on a blowy January morning.<\/p>\n
“He normally parked away from the sea, in the bushes where he was hidden and could sell drugs which was what he was known for.”<\/p>\n
I showed Mr Ralph pictures of Christian B from those days and more recent police photographs and asked if he was sure it was the same man.<\/p>\n
“Of course, it’s definitely him,” he said. “I remember him clearly, he was good-looking, spoke very good English and was polite, though not particularly friendly. A bit of a loner.”<\/p>\n
Read more:Police recover items in Portuguese reservoir search<\/a> Who is Christian B?<\/a> German court drops sex offence charges against suspect<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\nMr Ralphs’s evidence of a plan to steal a child is backed up by Michael Tatschl, a good friend of Christian B in those days.<\/p>\n
Tatschl told author Jon Clarke in his book, My Search For Madeleine: “He (Christian B) was always bragging about money and making money, particularly from burglaries. He even talked about selling kids, maybe to Morocco.”<\/p>\n
And Scotland Yard detectives have always believed that, whatever her ultimate fate, Madeleine was abducted in a carefully planned operation.<\/p>\n
Sky News has approached Christian B’s lawyer and Scotland Yard for comment.<\/p>\n
Source: \u00a0news.sky.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A plot to kidnap a child was being hatched in a Portuguese holiday resort a week before Madeleine McCann vanished there, Sky News has been told. Expat Ken Ralphs said that Christian B, the German
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