Police searching a lake for Madeleine McCann’s body believe they could disappoint the youngster’s family.
The area was known to the prime suspect in Madeleine’s disappearance as his “little paradise”.
Detectives from the Federal Criminal Police (BKA), the German equivalent of the FBI, spent several days combing land next to Arade Dam last month, reports the Mirror. They used sniffer dogs, radar and search teams to scour the location just 31 miles from where three-year-old Maddie vanished in 2007.
Prime suspect Christian Brueckner, 45, once referred to the location as his “little paradise”. Police have now been searching the area to track down clues as to whether Maddie was thrown in.
Officers dug several deep boreholes in the area. But, in a blow to Madeleine’s family, detectives are set to confirm they have not found anything of note.
German public prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters told Bild: “Please don’t expect too much.”
It remains unclear as to why investigators decided to search the land near the dam so thoroughly. Officers were seen chopping down trees and hacking away at undergrowth in the area.
Photographs appear to show the remains of a camp at the mysterious spot with broken furniture, a torn ship’s buoy and even what appeared to be a makeshift toilet fashioned from a chair.
Portuguese sources point to an informant giving police a specific tip-off that Brueckner visited the site just days after Maddie went missing from her room in Praia da Luz.
The tip-off is thought to match geolocation clues found in the convicted paedophile’s stash of 8,000 of videos and images. Together it is thought these clues combined sparked the search at the remote site.
It is claimed officers were searching for a gun and a camcorder tossed into the water. But Portuguese police sources were quick to dismiss that.
Regardless of what is found at the site, top German criminal profiler Axel Petermann, says the cops were right to dig at a place so close to Brueckner’s heart.
He told The Mirror: “The criminal perpetrators who I got to know over the years tend to hide their victims in places where they feel safe and can assess danger.
“These are places which are secluded and secret and where they can stop and assess various risks.
“They can also be places where they feel good, and where there is a certain private memory of a certain act.
“So, I think the search activity may have been going in this direction.
“My recommendation when dealing with suspects in the case of missing people, is always to find the places where these suspects spent time, where they had secrets, where they could assess risks, so from this point of view I think the investigators’ current search was very important.”
