TV sleuth says Madeleine McCann prosecutor should be sacked over ‘pointless’ search

EXCLUSIVE: Mark Williams-Thomas accused German legal chief Hans Christian Wolters of becoming so ‘absolutely fixated’ on nailing his prime suspect he ignores other evidence that could crack the case

The prosecutor heading the Madeleine McCann probe should be sacked following this week’s ‘pointless’ search, according to the Brit TV detective who exposed Jimmy Savile as a paedophile.

Mark Williams-Thomas accused German legal chief Hans Christian Wolters of becoming so ‘absolutely fixated’ on nailing his prime suspect he was ignoring other evidence that could crack the case.

The ex-cop said the three-day operation in Praia da Luz, Portugal, this week - ordered by Wolters - involving 60 officers was a ‘pointless exercise’ that had ‘come to nothing’.

German and Portuguese police spent three days scouring an abandoned village for clues a mile from the holiday apartment where Madeleine vanished in 2007.

Williams-Thomas, 55, said the information prompting the operation was ‘very very sketchy - nothing concrete at all’. Up to 20 derelict properties and an old well had all been ‘searched previously’, he said.

But the former Surrey Police officer said Wolters was in a desperate race against time to try and find evidence linking his prime suspect Christian Brüeckner to the crime.

Williams-Thomas said the prosecutor is ‘convinced’ the convicted child sex offender - who was living as a drifter in the Algarve when Madeleine vanished - abducted and murdered the then-three-year-old Brit girl.

But Wolters had ‘no evidence’ to support his ‘hypothesis’, said the telly sleuth whose shock doc on Jim’ll Fix It host Savile exposed him as a child sex monster following his 2011 death aged 84.

Unless Wolters can find something to link Brüeckner to the crime by September the suspect will walk free from jail where he is serving a seven-year sentence for raping a 72-year-old woman in Praia da Luz two years before Madeleine vanished.

In October Brüeckner, 48, was cleared of a series of separate rape and indecent assault charges after a non-jury trial in Germany in which a judge criticised the prosecution’s decision to publicly link him to Madeleine’s case.

Williams-Thomas said the prosecutor was so focussed on charging Brüeckner he was overlooking other potentially vital evidence.

This week it was revealed German authorities refused a Portuguese police request to launch an undercover operation to find out if a woman had run over Madeleine while driving drunk - then recruited her Brit husband to dump the body at sea. The tip-off came to UK cops from the man’s British sister.

A former military police officer separately claimed he had told Wolters precisely where to look to find vital evidence that could crack the case - but his officers searched in the wrong place.

Williams-Thomas said it was time Wolters was removed from the case to prevent a possible miscarriage of justice.

“No surprise the search in Portugal has come to nothing,” he said in a video posted on X.

“It’s not going to be a breakthrough. The information they were working on was very very sketchy - nothing concrete at all.

“That area had been searched previously and it was really a pointless exercise. But the Germans wanted to go through under the direction of the prosecutor Hans Wolters.

“He’s in a very difficult situation because he knows that Christian B will be released in September unless he can bring any evidence against him in relation to Madeleine McCann. That’s what he is absolutely fixated on. He’s convinced.

“He has told me very clearly that Christian B is responsible for the abduction and murder of Madeleine and he killed her in Portugal. He’s got no evidence to support that.

“That’s a hypothesis he’s come up with and actually, as a result of that, he has become so fixated on Christian B.

“It is one of the problems when you have got a senior investigating officer, or a prosecutor in this case, who becomes so fixated on one thing.

“Actually what happens is they set out to prove that hypothesis rather than keeping a totally open mind looking at every piece of information.

“Miscarrages of justice have been based primarily around a senior investigating officer who becomes fixated to get the evidence to build their case in line with their hypothesis against their suspect. They ignore the other evidence that comes in.”

Williams-Thomas said neither Brit nor Portuguese police - who also continue to probe Madeleine’s disappearance - share Wolters’ theory about what happened and the relationship between the international forces was ‘very poor’.

The Metropolitan Police’s Operation Grange team - which has been handed £13m of taxpayers’ cash to crack the case - continues to treat her as a missing person.

Brüeckner - who denies any involvement - has told when Madeleine disappeared he was with his girlfriend and they were together in his campervan when they were stopped by police looking for the youngster.

“The Germans are convinced but the British and the Portuguese have really stayed away from that - that it’s a murder investigation,” Williams-Thomas said.

“So the German prosecutor really is on his own and he’s set out to nail Christian B. He’s not a nice guy but it doesn’t make him a killer.

“It gets to a point where surely you have to ask the question, how much longer can the prosecutor still remain in place with that fixated view before you go: ‘Do you know what? Stop - you can’t just keep going at this’.

“Will we ever solve Madeleine McCann’s disappearance? We have to hope that we will because working in the field that I do I always keep hope that cases will be solved one day. We have to do that for the families.

“The family will always keep hope. The reality of course is that as the days became weeks, became months and now many many years the chances are very very slim. We’ve had so much money invested in the Madeleine McCann case.

“I look at the case and I wonder to myself how many other cases would have been solved if the same amount of money had been put to those other missing children cases.

“This is no criticism of the McCanns because they will obviously want every penny that is possible spent on them. But it is a reflection on society where some cases just don’t get the attention.

“It’s gone no further forward. It’s not even a British case. That’s what is most mad about it. Yes it’s a British child but it’s not under British jurisdiction. What about all these cases in the UK that are British jurisdiction that don’t have money ploughed into them.

“If you put the same amount of money into some of those other missing persons cases there is no doubt at all some would be solved. It’s very frustrating." Wolters had not responded to a request for comment.

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