The main suspect in the disappearance of three-year-old British girl Madeleine McCann, has been cleared of a series of sexual offences in an unrelated trial.

Christian Brückner, 47, who is already serving a seven-year jail term in Germany for rape, was acquitted of carrying out three rapes and two instances of sexual abuse in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.

Brückner has not been charged in the case of Madeleine McCann, who disappeared in Portugal in 2007 and has never been found.

Brückner’s defence team had argued he should be cleared because of a lack of evidence, although prosecutors had called for the court in Braunschweig in northern Germany to impose an additional 15-year jail term.

The trial began in February and during the summer the court lifted an arrest warrant in connection with the case, which was seen by some observers as an early indication that Brückner could be acquitted.

His lawyer, Friedrich Fülscher, said on Monday that acquittal was “the only correct outcome of the case” because two of the rape victims, a teenager and an elderly woman, had never been identified.

A key witness had earlier told the trial that he had broken into Brückner’s home in Portugal and found videos involving the rape of a girl and a woman aged 70 to 80. An Irish woman later told the court she had been raped when was 21 by a masked man who broke into her flat in Portugal in 2004.

Prosecutors say his existing seven-year jail term imposed by the court in Braunschweig in 2019 ends next September.