Christian Brueckner has made extraordinary claims in a series of letters claiming he didn’t abduct and kill Madeleine McCann (Pictures: AFP)

The prime suspect in the Madeleine McCann case has written a string of dark letters from his prison cell trying to convince the world of his innocence.

Police investigating Maddie’s disappearance believe she was kidnapped and murdered by convicted sex offender and child abuser Christian Brueckner.

In a major development this week, large-scale searches were carried out at a remote reservoir in Portugal that the 45-year-old used to visit regularly.

Following the conclusion of the search, which was conducted after German prosecutors received ‘certain tips’, a ‘relevant clue’ was reportedly discovered – but it may take months to be analysed. 

The site of the Barragem do Arade reservoir, near Silves, is around 30 miles from the Praia da Luz resort where Maddie vanished while on holiday with her family 16 years ago, aged just three.

And now it’s been revealed that Brueckner has hand-written pages and pages of letters in a desperate attempt to deny that he abducted and killed her, reports MailOnline. 

But a graphologist said the letters show that Brueckner was ‘distorted and deluded’ and indicated someone who wanted to ‘command and control’.

Brueckner believes there will ‘never be a trial’ over Maddie’s disappearance (Picture: AFP)

‘You can never imagine how it is when the whole world believes you are a child murderer, and you are not,’ he says in the letter written in pencil shortly before the searches began.

Brueckner, who is currently serving seven years in jail for raping a 72-year-old woman in the same area of the Algarve region of Portugal where Madeleine went missing, tries throughout his letter to protest his innocence. 

He seems to confidently believe that he will never have to face a judge over Maddie’s disappearance and claims: ‘There will never be a trial.’

‘I got told a long time ago that the prosecutor’s office was closing the Maddie case because there is not even the smallest evidence,’ he writes. 

‘The prosecutors are not saying anything to the public because they must give the files to my lawyers – and they contain many (sic) material which confirms my innocence.’

Maddie went missing in May 2007, aged three (Picture: AFP)

The Ocean Club in Praia Da Luz, Algarve, Portugal, where Madeleine McCann went missing (Picture: PA)

Brueckner says that he is being ‘persecuted’ by police and prosecutors who are ‘attempting to create a monster’ to ‘divert and let people think that I am the right one’.

He even makes extraordinary sexual allegations against one of the key members of the investigating team, writing:  ‘I mean a gay investigator who is in love with a big criminal. Outrageous. Have you ever heard that a hunter is f****** his prey?’

But his bizarre letter has been examined by graphologist Tracey Trussell, who has also analysed others he’s sent over the last two years, and she says his ‘fantastical views are constant, unchanging’.

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Ms Trussell said the long extended endstroke on the reclining letter S is symbolic of ‘someone who suffers with feelings of guilt’.

She said: ‘In some cases, this symbol is seen where a violent death has taken place close to the writer, and they are trying to come to terms with it.

‘Whatever the truth, there is a need to continually feed his ego, and his ultimate aim is to get some sort of recognition.’ 

She concluded that Brueckner is on a ‘short fuse’.

German and Portuguese police recovered items from the search that will be analysed (Picture: Getty Images)

In the letter, Brueckner implies he is struggling psychologically and says he is being scapegoated by the BKA – Germany’s central criminal investigation agency.

He says: ‘The torture I’m going through is the best evidence I can have. I’m not able to tell the real treatment I get because I don’t have the right words for it. Of course, this all happens by the orders of the BKA.’

His final protestation of innocence in the letter claims that the authorities are ‘not strong enough to admit the mistakes they made in the Maddie case’. 

‘So they try despairingly to accuse me of other weird stuff,’ he adds. ‘It doesn’t matter that I have a completely different look like the victims are saying.’

Authorities scoured the reservoir and surrounding areas for three days (Picture: PA)

At the end of the four-page letter, Brueckner has drawn a daisy with its petals coming off and written over it: ‘Guilty, not guilty, guilty, not guilty.’

The drawing is captioned: ‘Spring is coming.’

In a separate letter written a few weeks before, Brueckner claimed he was being deprived of his ‘prison rights’ and being restricted from having any outside visitors because authorities feared he would get ‘sexual satisfaction’ from interacting with other people.

He wrote: ‘It is against human rights to get isolated for such a long time and in this way. Not even Goebbels and his war crimes friends were isolated like me when they were awaiting their death penalty in Nuremberg prison.

‘It is the right of prisoners to receive visitors – except for me. All I see is my lawyer and the guards.’

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He’s written a string of dark letters from his cell to try and convince the world of his innocence.