Christian Brückner, the prime suspect in the Madeleine McCann case, has been cleared in the 1996 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. The 43-year-old was a suspect in the killing of Claudia Ruf, who was sexually assaulted and killed more than two decades ago. The victim’s body was found 70 km (43 miles) south of the German town of Grevenbroich in 1996. The young girl was abducted while walking a neighbor’s dog in May 1996. Her body was found two days after she went missing - soaked in petrol and burned partly.

According to reports, detectives investigating the potential link between Brückner and Ruf’s death said that after the DNA tests it has been confirmed that he was not involved in the crime. When the investigation into the case was launched, Robert Scholten, first police chief commissioner at Bonn police station, said that there was "no concrete evidence" stating that Brückner committed the crime, but regardless he was a suspect. But now an update has stated that Brückner was not involved in the gruesome crime and he did not kill Ruf. "After comparing the information obtained, it can be said that Christian B was not in Grevenbroich at the time of the crime in the case of Claudia Ruf. In addition, a DNA comparison is said to have been negative,” a police spokesman said.

Meanwhile, last week police in Germany dug up an allotment plot in Hanover where Brückner once lived. They found a hidden basement in the foundations of a building which neighbors said was demolished in late 2007 or 2008, months after McCann went missing in May 2007. The search operation was reportedly started on Tuesday, July 28, in which investigators were accompanied by specialist search dogs.

Brücker is currently serving a jail sentence in Germany for drug offenses and the rape of an American woman in Praia da Luz, Portugal in 2005. Earlier, this year, he was named the prime suspect in the disappearance of McCann, who went missing more than a decade ago from an apartment in the town of Praia da Luz, in Portugal’s Algarve region. Around the time of Madeleine's disappearance, the accused was believed to have lived at the plot.

Wolfgang Kossack, a 73-year-old man, whose plot is next to Brückner’s former allotment said the convicted rapist lived off-grid at the location in 2007. “I remembered his face from the pictures in the news. And I remember his van and his dogs. I had completely forgotten about him up until then,” he added.

Speaking to MailOnline, Kossack said: “Christian Brueckner had the garden next to mine. He arrived in 2007 and left within a year. He told me that he was living off the grid, that he had not registered with the authorities – no one knew he was there. He never did any gardening. He did not plant anything or try to grow anything. He just sat around drinking beer. At the time there was a building on the garden. It was a small wooden structure with only one room to keep tools and other things but it had a kitchen. The building was not really a house, you might call it a shed. But it had a cellar and underneath there would be foundations.”