Police who spent days searching near a dam for Madeleine McCann’s body have warned not to ‘expect too much’ from their finds.

Detectives from the Federal Criminal Police (BKA), Germany’s equivalent of the FBI searched land next to the Arade Dam in Portugal last month.

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’.

However 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.

Last month Helge Busching claimed to speak about the moment that Brueckner confessed to him about taking Madeleine.

Helge claims that, while the pair were drinking beers, Brueckner said ‘she didn’t scream’ in relation to Madeleine and her kidnapping.

The two men had the interaction at a music festival in 2008.

Mr Busching told German outlet Bild: ‘The topic [of Madeleine’s disappearance] came up and I said: ‘Anyway, I don’t understand how the little one could have disappeared without a trace.’

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.

It was claimed they were searching for a camcorder and a gun 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.’

Maddie was just three-years-old when she vanished from her holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in 2007.

German police are confident that Brueckner, who was named as the prime suspect in Maddie’s disappearance in 2020, is responsible for her disappearance.

He was charged with three offences of aggravated rape and two offences of the sexual abuse of children, in alleged crimes spanning 17 years between 2000 and 2017.

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