The night time I used to be raped and why it was prime Maddie suspect

First there was blind terror, then brutal subjugation and a pain so excruciating it has seared into Hazel Behan’s soul.

The Irish mum-of-three describes how, alone in a holiday apartment in Portugal, she was roused from sleep by a masked stranger with a machete, dressed entirely in black, calling her name.

Today, 20 years after a sustained sexual attack that took place when she was working as a holiday rep, Hazel, 41, remains traumatised. ‘I felt as if my body was on fire,’ she says, describing the assault. ‘You’re dealing with the mind, too, and it was torture. The pain, the bleeding, the powerlessness.

‘I’ve never felt fear like it. The blood seems to pool into your feet. The rest of you is freezing cold and you’re shaking uncontrollably. You’re paralysed. It’s like a car crash is about to happen and you know you can’t stop it. You’re convinced you’re going to die.’

Last week a judge in a German court acquitted convicted paedophile Christian Brueckner, 47, the prime suspect in the kidnapping of three-year-old Madeleine McCann in May 2007, of raping Hazel.

But prosecutors claim bias and say they will appeal the verdict. Brueckner was also found not guilty of two further rapes and two offences of indecent exposure involving children.

All cases are unrelated to Madeleine’s disappearance but are linked to areas close to the Algarve resort of Praia da Luz where the little girl was snatched 17 years ago.

The litany of convictions against Brueckner goes back to 1994 when, aged 17, he was first found guilty of sexual offences against children. He has also been convicted of drug dealing, theft, burglary and grievous bodily harm.

Hazel faced Brueckner in court two decades after the assault on her because she had responded to an appeal by British police working on Operation Grange – the codename for the Madeleine McCann case – for any information about Brueckner.

The man they described matched Hazel’s recollection of her attacker exactly. ‘I saw [his] photo; read the description. I was sickened. I could hear a rushing sound, like water in my ears. I thought I was going to vomit.

‘I knew I had to testify against him. People with his sick kind of mind thrive on silence. I didn’t want to exhume all the horror but I felt if I’d stayed silent he would have won.’

Although he was found not guilty of raping her because the judge decreed there was insufficient evidence, Hazel remains convinced that Brueckner, currently in prison for raping an American pensioner – when he was convicted, the court heard that he had enjoyed ‘torturing’ her – was the man who subjected her to the merciless attack in 2004.

She feels a potent mix of shock and outrage at his acquittal; fear, too, that Brueckner could be free by 2025 when his seven-year sentence ends, ramping up pressure on police to charge him over Madeleine’s disappearance. ‘The idea that Madeleine and I could be connected through this evil man, that he could have been the last person she saw in her little life, devastates me,’ says Hazel.

‘I think of her so much. I know I shouldn’t, but I also feel a huge sense of guilt that I didn’t fight more with the Portuguese police after I was attacked. Madeleine could be with her family now if the man who raped me had been caught and convicted.

‘But I stayed quiet because the police in Praia da Rocha told me to. I didn’t make a noise because one of them told me it would ‘ruin the tourist trade’. If there was any attempt by them at the time to find the perpetrator it was never reported to me.’

Bravely, though, she testified for two gruelling days against Brueckner at the district court in Braunschweig, northern Germany, earlier this year.

She was forced to sit a few feet from him; subject to the intense, blue-eyed gaze of a man she firmly believes subjected her to a dehumanising attack.

‘I feel let down,’ she says of his acquittal. ‘I went to Germany to try to help convict a criminal. Instead I felt berated and humiliated, and that my views had been dismissed.

‘Friends who’d agreed to give testimony were not called. I felt I was given a platform only to be annihilated and made a spectacle of. I was asked when I’d next had sex after the attack. Why was that relevant? I also found it insulting that anyone would tell me what I did and didn’t remember.’

The attack on Hazel took place in the coastal resort of Praia da Rocha, just half an hour’s drive from Praia da Luz where Madeleine was snatched.

How is Hazel so sure Brueckner is the man who raped her? Her evidence is compelling: ‘He wore a black face mask but I saw his eyes and they were so blue; piercing blue. They’re branded in my mind, a photo in my head. I’ll never forget them.

‘I could see a small area round his eyes, fair brows. He spoke English with a German accent. He is 6ft 1in tall. The man who raped me fitted the police description exactly.

‘People say, ‘How can you say it was Brueckner when you only saw his eyes?’ I saw his shape, his stature. His clothes were very form-fitting. And if someone does something untoward to you over a number of hours, their eyes are seared into your memory for ever.’

Portuguese police dispensed with evidence they had collected from the crime scene in Praia da Rocha after two years. Presiding judge Uta Engemann concluded that she could not convict Brueckner because: ‘There is no DNA, no fingerprints, no objects were found to prove that he was there.’

Hazel is forthright, articulate, persuasive. Her testimony rings with powerful authority.

She meets me at a hotel in her native Dublin, travelling with her oldest friend, Karen, because she will not stay alone overnight in a hotel room. Her sleep is disturbed; she checks locks throughout the night. Such vigilance is a legacy of the attack.

Her husband is at home looking after their daughters, aged 12 and eight. She also has a son, aged 19, and is sharply conscious that he is about the same age as Maddie McCann would be now.

She thinks back to her 20-year-old self, newly arrived in Praia da Rocha, where her job with an Irish travel company – long hours, scant pay – demanded good humour, stamina and an ever-watchful eye.

As well as looking after tourists staying in the holiday complex, she worked in the kids’ club. Marshalling children to and from the beach, distinctive in her yellow T-shirt, she was known by name throughout the resort.

Hazel was in her element. Naturally effervescent, she is the oldest of five siblings and enjoyed the outgoing nature of her job.

Less congenial was the solitary flat she returned to at night. At ground-floor level at the back of the hotel, next to a service road, it felt empty and unwelcoming. ‘Our house in Dublin was full of noise, so to end up in this quiet little apartment on my own felt strange.’ She was also unsettled that the lock on her balcony door – easily accessible from the road – was broken.

A few weeks before the attack she discovered money had gone missing from a shoebox she kept under her bed. ‘I kept odds and ends there. My passport, tweezers, scissors, money I’d been saving to take my brothers and sister out. They were due to come over with Mum for my 21st birthday in two weeks.’

Reporting the theft, she was reimbursed by her boss – but the door lock was never repaired, despite her repeated requests.

So the intruder had no problem getting into her flat.

It was the night of June 15, 2004. Hazel had been at a local Irish pub in Praia da Rocha with her then boyfriend Jason, a musician. They’d had a row, so that night she walked the short distance back to her apartment alone.

Lying fully clothed on her bed, she dropped off to sleep, then woke to hear her name being called. ‘In the millisecond it took me to wake up I thought it was my boyfriend coming to apologise.

‘Then I woke fully and I was paralysed with terror. There was a man, dressed all in black, in thick tights and a close-fitting top. He had a big knife in his hand.

‘It was as if he’d adopted a persona; an evil anti-hero. He’d come prepared with a rucksack. Inside were whips, rope, condoms, a video camera.

‘I froze. I knew that something really bad was going to happen and I was powerless to stop it. I was lying on my stomach. I turned my head. He was behind me. He stood above me, one leg over me, and pulled my hair.

‘He told me not to scream. I must have fought back – I can’t remember – but days later I found my fingernails that must have been torn off in a scuffle, in the bloodied sheets in my bed.

‘He cut my clothes off with scissors from my shoebox. I don’t think he expected to find me dressed.

‘Even now I don’t like to use the word rape because part of me wants to pretend it never happened or I’d go mad. I call it my ‘terrible awful’.

‘I quickly realised it was a power thing. ‘I’m in charge. You do what I tell you.’ He was very aggressive, violent, but methodical – as if he had planned it, had a script in his head, knew how he wanted it to go.

‘From the bedroom he dragged me into the living space and tied my legs to the breakfast bar.

‘My upper body was bent over the bar. He tied the rope round the back of my knees and stuffed some material in my mouth so I couldn’t breathe.

‘My hands were tied together with my belt. That’s when he started recording. He asked if I was afraid. I said ‘No’ because I knew he wanted me to say I was terrified. I thought: ‘If I’m going to die, I won’t give him anything.’

‘The cold, the shaking, were uncontrollable. He raped me anally and the pain was indescribable, horrendous. He was so violent, so forceful. He wanted to inflict the worst pain possible. He wanted to see the pain in my face.

‘I’ve had three children and childbirth is excruciating, but the outcome is glorious and purposeful – but there was no pain like this. It felt as if my whole body was on fire and my soul was in flames, too.’

Then, as the assaults continued – Hazel was raped three times – a self-preservation mechanism kicked in.

‘There is this innate part of you that says: ‘You cannot stop this. There is no control. You’re going to have to switch your mind off. It’s too much for a human to endure.’ So I managed to detach myself. I still have that capacity. But I also still end up in hospital with panic attacks, even now.’

Hours elapsed and finally her attacker untied her from the breakfast bar: ‘But I couldn’t stand. There was blood. I was slipping on it, on the floor. My hands were still tied. He wanted me to perform a sex act on him. I couldn’t. I was gagging.

‘He got angry then and told me to go to the bathroom. I thought: ‘He’s going to kill me now’ so I said ‘No’. Then he forced me to kneel over a small bench. He put a bed sheet over my head. I thought he was going to chop my head off then, with the big knife.

‘I could see under the sheet a little bit. All your senses are heightened. I could hear him pack things up, zip up his bag, then I saw him step backwards out on to the balcony.’

At this point Hazel, covering herself in a towel, fled. ‘I ran and ran, thinking he was following me. Worried he was in the lift, I ran down the stairs to reception.’

By now it was 6am. ‘I phoned my dad. I kept screaming. I said: ‘A man broke into my room.’ Dad said: ‘Did he touch you?’ and I said ‘Yes’.

‘Dad said: ‘I’m going to hang up now and make a phone call. Then I’ll be right back’, and within minutes my boyfriend was there with some clothes for me, and suddenly there were police everywhere. I remember thinking: ‘How did so many get here so quickly?’

But this was just the start of another ordeal; a further catalogue of appalling abuse and negligence.

‘There was no female officer, no translator, no one among the police who spoke English. They were just big Portuguese men. By this point I was almost robotic. They told me to go back with them to the apartment. I said I didn’t want to. They made me.

‘Then they made me strip naked and stand in a star jump position while they took pictures of me. I felt completely degraded again.

‘I thought the police would mind me. They did completely the opposite. I was put in an ambulance. No one was allowed to go with me. I was taken to hospital. I wasn’t allowed to have anyone there with me either.

‘I saw a gynaecologist and he was the first person who was kind and careful with me.

‘He examined my wounds, took some samples. You’re broken at that stage. I told him the attacker had used condoms, but he encouraged testing.’

Hazel has little idea of what forensic evidence was gathered by police from the apartment. She suspects that any search was cursory; attempts to find a suspect quickly abandoned. It took eight days for the police to ask her for a statement. ‘I was not given a translator; there was no female officer. I had to ask the manager of the local bar to come with me to interpret.

‘My mam, who had flown over from Dublin, wasn’t even allowed in the building either. I was a shell of myself. I sat slumped in a chair and the police were laughing amongst themselves.

‘One of them had his feet on the table. Another threw an evidence bag across the table at me with my clothes inside and said: ‘Do they belong to you?’

‘I gave a description of the attacker: height, build; I said he was German. They said: ‘You can’t say that. You have to say he was Germanic.’ But I insisted. He was German. End of.

‘I said there was a mark on his leg; perhaps a ladder in his tights, maybe a scar or a tear. Later I learned he had a very aggressive form of psoriasis and there could have been scars from that.’

The police, not merely careless, were insulting. Hazel was told not to speak about the attack ‘because it would ruin the tourist trade’.

Officers followed her around the resort. She asked ‘Why?’

‘We want to find out if you’re a slut,’ she was told. ‘Yet I hadn’t even kissed a man in Portugal other than my boyfriend,’ she says. She felt abused all over again.

‘I stayed with Mam. We barricaded the doors. I cried like the rain. I don’t think I cried after that for another ten years.’

Astoundingly, with a strength many would regard as superhuman, she managed to pick up the fractured fragments of her life.

She had a son with Jason. Although they separated – and the split was not harmonious – she returned with her son to Ireland, found a good man and learned to trust again. She and her husband Martin, 40, now have two daughters, aged 12 and eight, together. She has worked, largely helping others – recovering alcoholics, the homeless – but the burden of their needs fell heavily on her.

She struggled. She still does.

‘I’ve had counselling but it is not a cure. It is not erased. I still live with it. Someone took my power away from me and changed the footprints of my life for ever, without my permission, and that will never change.

‘What gets lost is the ripple effect, the impact on those around me – my parents, my children. I had to explain what happened to me to my 12-year-old daughter, in an age-appropriate way. I did not want her to Google me and read about it. I should not have to do that with my little girl.

‘One of the hardest things for me is that I fell asleep on June 15, 2004, and woke up a completely different person. I loved singing, acting. I had plans to go to university. I didn’t do any of it.’

Then, when she finally faced Brueckner in court – she testified against him at great personal cost emotionally – there was further humiliation.

‘He invoked his right to silence. He was not open to cross-examination, while I was bombarded with horrendous questions. Every aspect of my life was scrutinised and the trauma has reopened all the old wounds. It just seems so unfair.’

What would she like to happen to him? ‘It genuinely pains me that I have so much hatred for another human being,’ she says. ‘A person who continually offends should be kept off the streets. No woman or child is safe from him. It is not about me. It’s bigger than me. It’s about other people’s children, other women. For people like him, it’s a compulsion, a sickness. I hope he is never free.’

Portuguese police were contacted for comment.