The prime suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007 has been charged in Germany with several sexual offences allegedly committed in Portugal.
Christian B allegedly committed the offences between 2000 and 2017, German prosecutors said.
The prosecutor's office said the charges do not relate to the McCann case.
Madeleine was on holiday with her family in Praia da Luz in the Algarve region of Portugal in 2007 when she went missing from their holiday apartment.
Investigators believe the 45-year-old convicted sex offender killed Madeleine after abducting her. He has denied any involvement in the case, and was identified as a suspect by Portuguese officials in June 2020.
He is behind bars in Germany for raping a woman in the same area of the Algarve region of Portugal where Madeleine went missing in 2007.
Prosecutors say the sexual offence charges include three counts of aggravated rape and two counts of sexual abuse of children. They say he filmed the rapes.
Image:Madeleine McCann
The charges include:
Raping and beating a 70 to 80-year-old woman at her holiday flat in Portugal at an unspecified time between December 2000 and April 2006
Beating and forcing a girl aged over 14 to perform a sex act sometime between December 2000 and April 2006 at his house in Praia da Luz
Raping a 20-year-old woman from Ireland and performing a sex act on her at a flat in Praia da Rocha in Portugal on 16 June 2004
Exposing himself to a 10-year-old German girl at a beach in Salema in the district of Faro in Portugal on 7 April 2007
Exposing himself to an 11-year-old Portuguese girl at a playground in Bartolomeu de Messines in Portugal on 11 June 2017
The investigation into Madeleine's disappearance is continuing irrespective of the charges brought, prosecutors said.
The Federal Criminal Police Office and the prosecutor's office in Braunschweig issued a new request to the public for assistance with the McCann case.
Creeslough's welcome sign, picked out in gold lettering on a black background, proudly announces that the village is the "home of Bridie Gallagher, the Girl from Donegal", a popular entertainer in the '50s and '60s known as Ireland's first international pop star.
But in the last 24 hours, this village of just 400 people, in the northwest of Ireland, has become known around the world for a far more tragic and unwelcome reason.
When the Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin arrived here this evening, he appeared visibly struck by the eerie, penetrating silence of the scene around the wrecked petrol station.
Yes, dozens of journalists and emergency workers filled the street, but they were muted. Sombre. Unusually at events of this magnitude, there have been very few bystanders at the cordon.
"There's a terrible silence," Mr Martin told reporters. It reflected, he said, the enormity of what has happened here, a "deep sadness".
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Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin also pledged support to help the community get through the tragedy
A man who is no stranger to bereavement - he and his wife Mary have lost two children - even he seemed to struggle to find the right words when asked for a message to the grieving families.
"They've lost someone very dear to them", he said before pausing, perhaps remembering something from his personal experience. "That individual life, to each family, means so much. They must be given time and space to grieve, and to come through this."
A couple of birds chirped, and a few boots crunched over the broken glass, but it barely seemed to puncture the gloomy silence. The few locals that came to take a look weren't much in the mood to talk. One woman seemed relieved to hear the death toll was "only" ten people. She had feared it would rise much more dramatically.
Across the road, Siobhan Carr and her tireless staff at The Coffee Pod doled out hot drinks, vegetable soup, hearty ham and cheese sandwiches and delicate cupcakes to exhausted emergency workers and volunteers, all free of charge.
Image:The Coffee Pod gave out drinks to emergency services workers
Image:Pic: North West Newspix
They refused point-blank to take payment from the media, sheepish at the Donegal generosity being extended to them.
It's hard to imagine how exactly the village recovers from this. It's thought, police told us, that all the dead and injured are from the locality. Almost every family here will know someone dead or injured.
Ireland's Deputy Prime Minister Leo Varadkar reflected on a "freak accident that has left many empty chairs at dinner tables. It is just too hard to fathom".
It would be hard to fathom in a large village, harder still in a village of just a few hundred.
A tiny Irish hamlet proudly associated with the sound of music, its famous starlet. Now left mute.
A devastating explosion, followed by a terrible silence.
Vladimir Putin has described Russia’s air strikes on Ukraine, its most extensive since the early weeks of his seven-month invasion, as retaliation for the bombing of the bridge linking Russia to the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea.
Speaking at a meeting of his security council on Monday, the Russian president accused Kyiv of a “terrorist attack” at the Kerch bridge, damaged by an explosion on Saturday, and said “leaving such a crime without a response is just impossible”.
Though Putin claimed the targets were military, energy and communications assets, early footage and evidence of the damage showed that a playground and a bridge in central Kyiv were hit, as well as civilian infrastructure across the country. Russia’s defence ministry said its strikes “hit all the assigned targets”.
The Russian army has been losing ground in regions of southeastern Ukraine that Putin unilaterally claimed as part of Russia last month. On Saturday, Moscow suffered a blow to its prestige after the attack on the bridge, a symbol of the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, which it had claimed to be well guarded.
Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, said on Twitter: “Russia had been constantly hitting Ukraine with missiles before the bridge, too. Putin is desperate because of battlefield defeats and uses missile terror to try to change the pace of war in his favor.”
Ukraine’s air force said more than 80 Russian missiles had been fired at targets across the country by afternoon local time. “High-precision ground, sea and air-based wing missiles” were used, the air force wrote on Facebook. Air defences managed to intercept at least 41 of the missiles, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, said in the morning. Ukraine also said it destroyed nine of 12 Iranian Shahed-136 kamikaze drones.
The missiles also struck Lviv, in western Ukraine; Dnipro, in the centre of the country; and several other cities, including Zaporizhzhia and Mykolayiv in the south, which are close to the frontline.
There were reports of explosions in the Black Sea port of Odesa, and air raid alerts went off in every part of Ukraine, other than occupied Crimea.
Putin warned he was prepared to repeat the strikes if Ukraine continued to hit Russian infrastructure targets. On Sunday, he accused Ukrainian intelligence services of hitting the Kerch bridge.
“If attempts to carry out terrorist attacks on our territory continue, Russia’s response will be severe and at the level of the threats facing it. Nobody should be in any doubt,” Putin said on Monday.
Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the Kerch bridge attack, though senior officials gloated on social media and the post office issued a stamp commemorating the blast.
Three cruise missiles launched from Russian ships in the Black Sea had crossed Moldova’s airspace on Monday, said Moldova’s foreign minister Nicu Popescu, adding that he had summoned Russia’s ambassador to Chișinău, the capital.
The strikes killed at least 10 people and injured at least 60, Maryanna Reva, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s police, said on state television, citing preliminary details.
Russia’s missile attacks on Ukrainian cities on Monday “amount to war crimes”, the EU said. Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg called them “horrific and indiscriminate”, vowing the alliance would support Ukraine against Russia “for as long as it takes”.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken said he had spoken with Kuleba to express support for Kyiv following the strikes. “We will continue to provide unwavering economic, humanitarian and security assistance so Ukraine can defend itself and take care of its people,” Blinken wrote on Twitter.
Nato will host a meeting of western countries supplying arms to Ukraine on Wednesday, and a gathering of defence ministers from the 30 allied countries on Thursday.
The strikes came two days after Russia appointed Sergei Surovikin, a former air force general known for his ruthlessness in leading Russia’s operations in Syria, as commander of its invasion operations.
Hardline Russian war supporters, who had criticised the army for its battlefield setbacks and called on Putin to escalate Russia’s efforts in the war, cheered Surovikin’s appointment and the strikes.
“There’s the response for you,” Margarita Simonyan, editor of Kremlin-funded news channel RT, wrote on social media app Telegram. “The Crimean bridge was the red line from the very beginning. It was obvious,” she added.
In Kyiv, missiles or rockets struck the central intersection of Volodymyrska Street and Shevchenko Boulevard, at the north-west entrance of Shevchenko park, one of the busiest junctions in the Ukrainian capital during the morning rush hour.
Images showed damage to a children’s playground in Shevchenko park and to a pedestrian bridge nicknamed the “Klitschko” bridge after the city’s mayor.
Photos and videos sent to the Financial Times by government officials showed first responders and ambulances at the scene.
Images on Telegram showed damage to a skyscraper near the main train station in Kyiv, housing the offices of DTEK, a large electricity producer owned by Rinat Akhmetov, one of Ukraine’s richest men.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy released a short video saying Russia had used missiles and suicide drones to target “critical infrastructure” and ordinary citizens. “They want panic and chaos, they want to destroy our energy system. They are hopeless,” he said, standing outside his office in downtown Kyiv.
Separately, Belarus’s leader Alexander Lukashenko said he and Putin had agreed to set up a joint group of troops “because of the escalation on the western borders” of both countries, according to Belarus state news agency Belta on Monday. His remarks follow a meeting with Putin last week.
Belarus, Moscow’s closest ally, has allowed Russia to use its territory to attack Ukraine since Putin’s invasion began in February but has resisted letting its own troops and equipment be drawn into the conflict.
LONDON, Oct 10 (Reuters) - Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said on Monday he had ordered troops to deploy with Russian forces near Ukraine in response to what he said was a clear threat to Belarus from Kyiv and its backers in the West.
The remarks from Lukashenko, who has held power in Belarus since 1994, indicate a potential further escalation of the war in Ukraine, possibly with a combined Russian-Belarus joint force in the north of Ukraine.
"Strikes on the territory of Belarus are not just being discussed in Ukraine today, but are also being planned," Lukashenko said at a meeting on security, without providing evidence for the assertion. "Their owners are pushing them to start a war against Belarus to drag us there."
"We have been preparing for this for decades. If necessary, we will respond," Lukashenko said, adding that he had spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin about the situation while at a meeting in St Petersburg.
Lukashenko said he had agreed with Putin to deploy a regional military group, and had started pulling forces together two days ago, apparently after an attack on Russia's road and rail bridge to Crimea early on Saturday.
Lukashenko said that a warning was delivered to Belarus through unofficial channels that Ukraine planned "Crimean Bridge 2", though he did not give details.
"My answer was simple: 'Tell the president of Ukraine and the other lunatics: if they touch one metre of our territory then the Crimean Bridge will seem to them like a walk in the park'."
Belarus's army has about 60,000 people. Earlier this year, Belarus deployed 6 battalion-tactical groups, totaling several thousand people, to the border areas. On Sunday, the head of Belarus's border guards accused Ukraine of provocations at the border.
Russian forces used Belarus as a staging post for their Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, sending troops and equipment into northern Ukraine from bases in Belarus.
Reporting by Reuters; editing by Guy Faulconbridge
Within minutes of the first reports around Monday's early morning missile strikes on the centre of Kyiv, one name began to dominate discussion of Moscow's shifting military tactics.
A military veteran who served in the Soviet Union's ultimately doomed war with Afghanistan during the 1980s, he was appointed on Saturday as the commander of Russia's invading forces in Ukraine.
The 55-year-old is infamous for ordering troops to open fire on pro-democracy protesters in Moscow, when three people were killed during the final days of the Soviet Union in 1991.
He went on to lead Russian forces' intervention during the Syrian War in 2017.
Gen Surovikin is accused of complicity in the indiscriminate bombing of opposition fighters and of overseeing chemical weapons attacks, in a campaign thought to have been pivotal in helping Syria's government regain control over most of the country.
The consensus among experts is that Vladimir Putin's decision to have him take charge of Russia's forces in Ukraine is a direct result of his reputation for ruthlessness and brutality.
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Military analyst Forbes McKenzie, head of McKenzie Intelligence, told Sky News the main reason for his appointment was Gen Surovikin's "brand".
"He's seen as a hero of the former Soviet Republic," he said.
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"He has shown his ability to wage a war that involves nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, the last of which he used in Syria.
Image:Gen Surovikin is accused of overseeing indiscriminate bombing of anti-government forces in Syria. Pic: AP
"Putin's regime has repeatedly issued threats over recent weeks of using a nuclear option. We need to think about what the capability is, the intent and the opportunity.
"So they have already signalled their intent, but they would need commanders who would have the capability to do it.
"This is a man who has used chemical weapons in recent history, so that demonstrates capability."
Putin's power struggle
Mr McKenzie said another factor in the appointment is likely to be how it will affect the power struggle around the Kremlin that many commentators suggest has emerged since the launch of Russia's troubled military campaign in Ukraine.
Gen Surovikin is seen as an ally of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder and head of the shadowy Wagner mercenary group, which is believed to have been active for Russia in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Image:The founder of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and Vladimir Putin in 2010. Pic: AP
He has been among the most prominent hawkish critics of Russia's defence ministry while demanding an escalation of the conflict from Moscow.
"Prigozhin gave Surovikin a thumbs up on his [messaging app] Telegram channel over the weekend," Mr McKenzie said.
"So there is a strong indication that this appointment is also Putin consolidating his power among the various commanders."
And in wider terms, Mr McKenzie suggested the move would also go some way towards placating the many hawkish voices in Russia.
"The nationalistic supporters that Putin enjoys a pretty strong power base from are asking him to go further than he has so far," he said.
"A way to signal that is by essentially saying, 'you've asked me to go further. Now I've got the top man for the job, someone who's shown he is capable of that, in Surovikin'."
Professor Luke March, professor of post-Soviet and comparative politics at the University of Edinburgh, agreed that the symbolism of the appointment would have been crucial to Surovikin's appointment.
He told Sky News: "Pressure has clearly been growing on Putin in recent weeks from a broad range of nationalists who are asking: 'Why don't you bomb their infrastructure? Why don't you bomb Kyiv?'
"The fact Surovikin is a savage and someone who's notorious for shooting protesters and using chemical weapons in Syria sends out a clear signal, while increasing the intimidation factor.
Image:The man appointed to lead Russian forces in Ukraine is said to have ordered troops to open fire on protesters in Moscow, in 1991. Pic: AP
"They want to show they're not afraid to use whatever they have available and here the message is that this guy has no limits.
"Also, externally this tells Ukraine and the West: 'We're not backing down'."
Mr McKenzie said a bonus for the Russian president would be that Surovikin, because of his high-profile past, can be blamed for the likely continued failures of Russia's forces.
"By putting in place a person many of these voices perceive to be the best man for the job, if he fails, Putin can say 'well, I've done my bit, but Surovikin has failed'.
Image:Special event at the Imperial War Museum examining the conflict in Ukraine
"He's been in charge of Russia's forces in Kherson, and that has gone abysmally for them. He doesn't have the military functioning mass to win in Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. His army is broken and there's no way it can now win.
"He's on a hiding to nothing and has been given a job he can't possibly win.
"It's going to be a rough winter for the Russians I think, and he's going to take the rap for it.
"But then again, he's got the ability to perhaps go places where other generals wouldn't be willing to go.
The nuclear threat
"He's there to underpin that particular threat, around the use of nuclear weapons.
"It sends a message to the West and [Ukrainian president Volodymyr] Zelenskyy that they have the capability to go alongside the threat of upping the ante in regards to operating in a chemical and nuclear environment.
Image:Russia's leaders have repeatedly warned of the country's nuclear capabilities
"To his own people, it also says to Putin's nationalistic hardliners that he's listening and he's happy to put in place a general who speaks their language."
However, Mr McKenzie added that it was important to note that so far, there aren't clear signs on the ground that Russia is preparing to use nuclear weapons.
"As of today, there's no escalation beyond what we saw last week," he said.
"We actually look at the reality of what specialist equipment is being deployed and where it's being deployed, and there's no indication of that anywhere.
"Has Surovikin got the opportunity to use chemical or nuclear weapons? Not at this time. There has been no preparation taking place in any of the battle spaces that suggests Russia is ready to shift to that approach imminently."
Russia ramped up security on its only bridge to Crimea after a huge blast destroyed sections of it on Saturday.
President Vladimir Putin has now ordered the country's Federal Security Service (FSB) to oversee the key crossing to the occupied peninsula.
The bridge is also a pivotal symbol of Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. The blast killed three people, Russian investigators said.
Officials said work to fix the damaged sections would begin immediately.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin ordered the destroyed parts of the bridge to be taken down, and said divers would begin investigating damage below the waterline on Sunday morning.
Video shared on social media showed a long queue of vehicles at the bridge to leave Crimea towards Russia on Sunday.
6km-long queue before the bridge on the way out of Crimea, according to Russian war propaganda project WarGonzo. pic.twitter.com/bO4kASV8Nw
Hailed by Russian media as "the construction of the century", the bridge has been crucial to Russia for the movement of military equipment, ammunition and troops into southern Ukraine.
But new satellite images released on Saturday showed smoke and fire near the collapsed areas of the 19km (12-mile) bridge, which was opened with much fanfare four years after Moscow annexed Crimea.
Since the bridge plays a strategic role in the war, Ukrainian authorities have said it is a legitimate target, as they vow to retake the peninsula.
Ukrainian officials responded with thinly veiled approval to the explosion - but have not indicated that their forces were behind the attack.
President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged the incident in his nightly address on Saturday, saying: "Today was not a bad day and mostly sunny on our state's territory."
"Unfortunately, it was cloudy in Crimea. Although it was also warm," he added.
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Russian authorities moved swiftly to reopen those parts of the key crossing still intact, and said late on Saturday that the bridge had been partially reopened to road and rail traffic.
Speaking on Sunday, the Moscow-appointed governor of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, said rail traffic would continue as normal but the surviving roadway would for now take only light vehicles.
Lorries and buses would be transported by ferry, he added.
The bridge is a vital artery in Moscow's supply chain to the battlefront in its invasion of Ukraine - and to the annexed Crimean territory itself.
President Putin is to hold a meeting of the Russian Security Council on Monday, in what the Kremlin says is a planned event.
Mr Aksyonov said there was a desire for revenge, but made reassurances that the peninsula still had a month's worth of fuel and more than two months' worth of food.
"The situation is manageable - it's unpleasant, but not fatal," he said.
Ukrainian official David Arakhamia, parliamentary head of Mr Zelensky's party, said "Russian illegal construction is starting to fall apart and catch fire.
"The reason is simple: If you build something explosive, then sooner or later it will explode."
And a Ukrainian MP told the BBC that regardless of who was responsible for the attack, this was a "big Ukrainian victory and very severe and hard loss for Russia".
"The bridge is not destroyed but damaged, but the image of Putin is destroyed, that is the most important thing," Oleksiy Goncharenko said.
It is hard to overstate the political, symbolic and strategic significance of the Crimean bridge. Russian officials previously claimed it was well protected from threats from air, land or water - particularly since it is more than 100 miles from Ukrainian-held territory.
A Russian national anti-terrorism committee said the damage was caused by a truck bomb blowing up, which caused seven railway carriages to catch fire. The home of a man from the Krasnodar region of southern Russia is being investigated, it added.
While Ukraine has not linked its armed forces to the explosion, it has targeted Crimea in the past. Last month, Ukraine claimed responsibility for a series of air strikes on Crimea - including an attack on Russia's Saky military base.
Since the bridge attack on Saturday, Ukraine's social media has erupted in celebration. Its second-largest bank says it has already issued a new debit card design featuring the collapsed bridge.
In recent weeks, Kyiv's forces have taken back significant amounts of territory seized by Russia earlier in the war.
Hours after the bridge explosion, Russia appointed a new commander to lead its troops in Ukraine. Sergei Surovikin is a veteran commander known for leading Russian forces in Syria and was accused of overseeing the decimation of the city of Aleppo.
But Russia still controls swathes of Ukraine, including the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant - the biggest in Europe.
Creeslough's welcome sign, picked out in gold lettering on a black background, proudly announces that the village is the "home of Bridie Gallagher, the Girl from Donegal", a popular entertainer in the '50s and '60s known as Ireland's first international pop star.
But in the last 24 hours, this village of just 400 people, in the northwest of Ireland, has become known around the world for a far more tragic and unwelcome reason.
When the Irish prime minister Micheal Martin arrived here this evening, he appeared visibly struck by the eerie, penetrating silence of the scene around the wrecked petrol station.
Yes, dozens of journalists and emergency workers filled the street, but they were muted. Sombre. Unusually at events of this magnitude, there have been very few bystanders at the cordon.
"There's a terrible silence," Mr Martin told reporters. It reflected, he said, the enormity of what has happened here, a "deep sadness".
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Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin also pledged support to help the community get through the tragedy
A man who is no stranger to bereavement - he and his wife Mary have lost two children - even he seemed to struggle to find the right words when asked for a message to the grieving families.
"They've lost someone very dear to them", he said before pausing, perhaps remembering something from his personal experience. "That individual life, to each family, means so much. They must be given time and space to grieve, and to come through this."
A couple of birds chirped, and a few boots crunched over the broken glass, but it barely seemed to puncture the gloomy silence. The few locals that came to take a look weren't much in the mood to talk. One woman seemed relieved to hear the death toll was "only" ten people. She had feared it would rise much more dramatically.
Across the road, Siobhan Carr and her tireless staff at The Coffee Pod doled out hot drinks, vegetable soup, hearty ham and cheese sandwiches and delicate cupcakes to exhausted emergency workers and volunteers, all free of charge.
Image:The Coffee Pod gave out drinks to emergency services workers
Image:Pic: North West Newspix
They refused point-blank to take payment from the media, sheepish at the Donegal generosity being extended to them.
It's hard to imagine how exactly the village recovers from this. It's thought, police told us, that all the dead and injured are from the locality. Almost every family here will know someone dead or injured.
Ireland's deputy prime minister Leo Varadkar reflected on a "freak accident that has left many empty chairs at dinner tables. It is just too hard to fathom."
It would be hard to fathom in a large village, harder still in a village of just a few hundred.
A tiny Irish hamlet proudly associated with the sound of music, its famous starlet. Now left mute.
A devastating explosion, followed by a terrible silence.
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