Irishwoman says she will ‘never forget’ the eyes of alleged rapist and prime suspect in Madeleine McCann case – The Irish Times

Mullingar woman Hazel Behan has told a German court she will “never forget” the black eyes of Christian Brückner, who she accuses of suffering permanent injuries after a June 2004 attack in Portugal.

The 40-year-old told the Braunschweig regional court that she feared for her life for over four hours during the “hateful, aggressive” attack.

She was speaking on the second day of her testimony at the Braunschweig Regional Court in the trial of Brückner, a 47-year-old German citizen who faces three counts of rape and two counts of indecent assault.

Brückner has been named as the main suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the teenager who vanished from her family’s Algarve holiday home in 2007.

In four hours of tense testimony, Ms Behan recalled how she was working as a 20-year-old holiday representative at the Clube Praia da Rocha resort in June 2004 when she was raped in her ground floor room by a black-clad, masked man. She told the court that she could only see his eyes throughout the entire rape.

When asked repeatedly how she could identify Brückner by his eyes, Ms Behan said the extreme nature of the situation made his eyes the only thing to focus on and remember.

“I’m bored, I’ll never forget it,” she said. “Everything he wore was so dark, it was like they were just lights, so bright that I just never… I just knew them.”

Ms Behan explained in detail the day of the attack. She supervised the hotel’s children’s camp twice until 5:30 p.m. and held a mini disco from 8:30 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Afterwards, she was at a local bar where her boyfriend Jason Coates worked.

She went back to her apartment and fell asleep, but was woken up around 3 a.m. by someone calling her name. Then she saw a man dressed all in black, including thick women’s tights and a mask.

She said he gestured with a knife, put a cloth in her mouth and told her, “If you scream, I’ll kill you.”

He pulled her up from the bed by her hair, cut off her clothes in the first fight, and she lost at least a fingernail. He set up a video camera and filmed himself raping and whipping her.

Brueckner, wearing a rumpled blue jacket, remained impassive throughout the hearing, occasionally raising his right index finger to his chin or lower lip.

Ms Behan said she went to the hotel reception after the attack and was in hospital for four days.

Judge Ute Engelmann quoted an email to the court from Mr Coates, Behan’s former boyfriend. She asked if Ms Behan knew “why Jason is now saying what happened to you is not true”.

“I have no reason why I don’t know why he would say that,” Ms. Behan said.

She stayed with Mr Coates after the attack, became pregnant but had low self-esteem, particularly after he made it clear he did not want to be a father and “I didn’t like the way I looked pregnant”.

When she was six months pregnant, she said he packed her bags and left her “in the middle of the street.”

She said: “Jason told me he would spend the rest of his life talking badly about me so people would hate me.”

On Thursday morning she was questioned in detail about her previous statements in court and possible contradictions in statements to police in Portugal, Ireland and Germany.

She said that the Portuguese police did not provide an official translator and that she had to ask a friend for help, to whom she did not want to explain all the details.

She became aware of Brückner in June 2020 when her brother sent her a link to a story about how he admitted to raping another woman in Portugal in 2005.

He is currently serving a prison sentence for that attack and is scheduled to be released next year.

When asked why she went public with her story, Ms Behan said she was inspired when she heard someone else on Irish radio talking about how to turn another difficult experience into something positive.

“I wanted other women to feel like there was a safe place they could go,” she said. “I had nowhere, that’s why.”

She kept the details of the attack out of the radio interview, but the response – particularly calls to the Rape Crisis Center – was so strong that Ms Behan agreed to a second television interview on RTÉ’s The Late Late Show.

At one point in her second four-hour block of testimony, with more defense questions in the afternoon, Ms. Behan became emotional and asked for a short break.

After the proceedings – and being spoken to – by a translator, Ms Behan was asked if she had noticed anything unusual or abnormal about her attacker.

“Everything he did was really not normal,” she said. “I found him very aggressive and hateful,” she said. “I felt like he thought: I’m the man; I’m in control.”

*The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre’s free 24-hour hotline can be contacted on 1800 77 8888