To try to get in touch with the parents of the missing child, "Julia" set up an Instagram account.
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| Madeleine McCann identity |
After claiming to be Madeleine McCann, a British toddler who vanished 16 years ago, a German lady, 21, gained notoriety. One of the most puzzling police cases in history, the disappearance is still unexplained.
The lady, whose name she gives as Julia, last Tuesday (14) started an Instagram account under the name "I am Madeleine McCann" that now has more than 104,000 followers.
She provides "proof" in the 35 posts—photos, videos, and texts—that she is the missing British woman and begs for assistance in getting in touch with Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry McCan.
"I assume I'm Madeleine," the English-language profile biography begins. I require a DNA test. Investigators from the UK and Poland tried to ignore me. Here, I'll share my tale. Assist me.
The German has features with the missing child from when she was younger, including the fabled eyeliner, nose, grin, and even ears, in numerous of the images that have been published. She also makes a facial comparison with Maddie's parents.
Julia claims in one of the earliest entries that she doesn't remember the majority of her childhood but that she has a very vivid recall of a vacation in a warm location with white houses—a description that is virtually exact to the Algarve in Portugal, the location of Maddie's disappearance.
Julia also says that as a child she was abused by a man who looked like Christian Brueckner, a 43-year-old German man whom British and German authorities identified as a suspect in 2020.
Opinions in the hundreds of comments vary. While some claim that they resemble one another, others don't notice the resemblance.
Shouldn't Kate and Gery already be aware of this? Why is there no action? Why aren't these things in the news? Extremely weird," a user writes on the internet, while others contend that even if "Julia" is not Madeleine, she should still get assistance in order to try to ascertain her genuine identity.
Since May 3, 2007, when she vanished from the Algarve, Portugal, resort apartment where she was staying with her siblings and eating dinner with her parents, Madeleine has been missing. That would be her fourth birthday.
Due in large part to the girl's parents' extensive media push to track down her location, the case had significant global implications. 600 persons were probed, and four were first thought to be suspects.
After DNA was discovered in a car the family hired 25 days after reporting Madeleine missing, Portuguese police in September 2007 designated Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, as suspects in their daughter's abduction.
They refuted all of the accusations, and as a result, the case was dismissed.
When British and German police declared in June 2020 that they had named German national Christian Brueckner, who was 43 at the time, as a suspect in the case, it marked one of the investigation's turning points. He has a history of trafficking drugs and abusing children.
Yet, no crime connected to the disappearance has been brought against Brueckner. He committed a rape in the same area of the Algarve where Madeleine vanished, landing him in jail in Germany.
The German prosecutor who has been looking into the issue since 2020, Hans Christian Wolters, stated on May 4, 2022 that police think they have discovered "certain facts and fresh evidence," adding, "We are positive that he [Brueckner] is the killer of Madeleine McCann."