Madeleine McCann was snatched by ­Christian Brueckner after a chance encounter, an old pal of the suspect claims.

Christian Post has come out for the first time accusing the convicted German paedophile of kidnapping three-year-old Maddie from Praia da Luz on the Algarve, Portugal in May 2007.

Post, 54, claims Brueckner stole up to 100 passports from holiday apartments he burgled on chilling “night-crawls” across the resort and ran off with the tot in the "spur of the moment", the Mirror reports.

The musician and IT whizz, also from Germany, made mates with the unsolved case's lead suspect at a bar in the Algarve a couple of years earlier.

Unaware of 45-year-old Brueckner's twisted sex offender past, Post failed to tip off investigators straight away that his drinking buddy could be worth questioning.

He now wants to help bring him to justice over the missing toddler.

Post said: “Now I know about his paedophile past, his rapist past. I’m 100% certain it was him.

“I think he found her by chance and just took her on the spur of the moment.

“I think once you are a paedophile, there is a switch in your brain that cannot be turned off. If he saw a little girl asleep, alone in her apartment, he would definitely have taken her.

“Thinking about what he has done in the past makes me sick, it makes me want to vomit knowing I was hanging with him. If he is convicted of taking Madeleine I hope they lock him up and take away the key.”

Post said he knew his new pal was on the “fringes” of crime but had no idea of the true scale until a later visit to his ramshackle farmhouse.

He said: “I was sat in the living room and noticed piles of passports on the fireplace. There honestly must have been between 60 and 100 of them, neatly stacked up in three piles.

“He told me he got them on his ‘­night-crawls’ in Praia da Luz, climbing onto balconies and through windows. It shows how many burglaries he must have done.

“He said he would go into rooms and take what he wanted. At the time I guessed he was talking about cash, jewellery, ­passports… but now who knows?

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“He would only do it at night, it was too risky being seen in the daylight.

“He also said he was trafficking a bit of weed to make cash. But there was absolutely no sign he was into children or anything like sexual crimes.

“Do I have regrets not telling the police about the passports at the time? I guess I do.

“But now I’m willing to go back to court, to face him again, and help convict him if they want me to.”

Post only discovered Brueckner had been convicted of child sex offences after reading about them in the press.

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