The new suspect in the Madeleine McCann case was filmed at the wheel of a yellow VW campervan ‘weeks before police believe he used it to kidnap the little girl’.

New footage reportedly shows Christian Brueckner, 43, laughing and joking with a group of three hitchhikers who travelled with him to Spain.

Viewers see the convicted sex offender pouring over a map and sitting at the wheel of the battered yellow van in footage obtained by Mail Online.

At one point Brueckner, who is wearing a black necklace with a white T-shirt, flashes the peace sign.

The video was taken on March 30, 2007 – about five weeks before Madeleine went missing from an apartment in Praia da Luz in Portugal.

The van, which the German paedophile used to sleep in on the beach near Praia da Luz, is understood to have since been sold for scrap – potentially destroying key evidence.

Brueckner’s lawyer Friedrich Fulscher says he ‘denies any involvement’ in her disappearance.

One man in the footage, identified only as Tomas, said he was sickened when he realised he’d shared a journey to Spain with Brueckner.

He said: ‘It makes me sick to think that the little girl could have been taken away in the same van a month later.

‘He seemed like any other ordinary young man. He was cheerful and joked a lot and happy to give us a ride in his VW van.

‘He didn’t mind us filming him and taking his pictures. He was happy to pose and must have known we could never suspect what a terrible man he really was.

‘We couldn’t have known that he was such a monster in truth.’

Tomas was completing a challenge for a German radio station at the time the footage was taken.

Documented online in the form of a video diary, it involved lugging a trailer across Europe while surviving on €10 a day.

Reflecting on the trip, Tomas said it appeared Brueckner was trying ‘too hard’ to be liked.

He said: ‘He was a stranger and he decided to drive us for around 280 kilometres.’

‘I thought it was a very good gesture from him, but it seems to me now that [he] needed company. We did like him, but we didn’t know him really.’

German detectives spent this week poring over an allotment once used by Brueckner in the city of Hanover – where the suspect reportedly used to live.

At the site, police are said to have searched a disused cellar once believed to be part of a garden house that was torn down in 2007.

An estimated 100 police officers used excavators, shovels, rakes and sniffer dogs as they completed their search.

Police were tight-lipped on exactly what they hoped to find at the site but they did confirm it was related to the McCann investigation.

Brueckner is currently serving a jail term for drug trafficking offences.

He has a number of previous convictions including the sexual assault of a girl, 6, and the rape of an American woman, 72, in Praia da Luz in 2005.

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