Madeleine McCann suspect's brutal response to police searching her home

A woman said to be a the centre of a hit-and-run theory linked to the disappearance of British toddler Madeleine McCannn is said to have got angry with police.

The German, who was in a relationship with a now-deceased British man, had her home in Praia de Luz searched twice by police investigating whether Maddie had been hit by a car on the night she went missing. She reportedly became angry when she was asked to empty her freezer.

She snarked at the police officer: "Do you think I've cut her up in little pieces and I'm going to have her for dinner?"

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Portuguese and British police investigated the woman seven years ago. They said their focus was on a theory that three-year-old Madeleine woke up, got out of her family's apartment through an unlocked patio door and was killed in a hit-and-run accident.

Back in June, the Mirror reported the shocking new theory about Madeleine's disappearance which emerged in the Portuguese daily newspaper Correio da Manha.

It said German prosecutors refused to probe a couple suspected of running over Madeleine McCann in a drink-drive accident. The newspaper said Portuguese authorities demanded an investigation into a British man and his German wife after his UK-based sister tipped off cops.

Now the German woman has been tracked down and she said she was not aware she had been under suspicion, Sky News reports.

She claimed, at the time, she'd been working in a restaurant near the beach in Praia da Luz and got home after the time Madeleine was discovered missing from her bed.

Her British partner was a chef at the Ocean Club who had served dinner to the McCanns and their friends, she claimed. "I don't even know if there was a car accident, because I was working," she told Sky News. "I came home at half ten, and my boyfriend was home already."

She added that the couple' flat, like the homes of many residents, was searched by Portuguese police in the days after Madeleine vanished.

Back in the summer, the Portuguese newspaper reported that the sister of the unnamed British man at the centre of the new theory tipped off police in 2018.

The report stated: “German prosecutors were asked to authorise a covert police operation with someone posing as a friend of the woman’s and trying to get her to confess, but the courts refused.

“It was decided to continue solely with the investigation into suspect Christian Brueckner, rejecting other possibilities.”

The German woman added that more than 10 years later, German police contacted her, but only to ask her if she knew Christian B and if she had seen him near the McCanns' apartment.

She added: "They wanted to know if I ever saw this German bloke around this area where I was living for a long time. Other people obviously saw his van, but I never saw it."

Maddie's mother, Kate, has long belived that Maddie did not leave the apartment herself.

Writing in her book Madeleine, she wrote: "To give any credence whatsoever to the idea Madeleine could have walked out on her own you would have to accept that she had gone out the back way, pulling aside the sitting room curtains and drawing them again, then opening the patio door, the child safety gate at the top of the stairs on the veranda and the little gate to the road - and carefully closing all three behind her.

"What three-year-old do you know who would do that?"