Madeleine McCann case puts Germany's missing children in the spotlight
René Hasee was six years old when he disappeared on a
Portuguese beach in 1996. He was playing in the sand. His father and father's
girlfriend looked away momentarily — and then René was gone.
The beach from which René disappeared was in the Algarve
region, on Portugal's southeastern tip. Not far away is Praia da Luz, where
Madeleine "Maddie" McCann disappeared from her bed in a hotel
compound while her parents were dining nearby.
Since the publication of the latest findings in the McCann
case, German media have been reporting that the suspect had been spending time
on the Algarve coast in the 1990s as well.
For the past week René's father Andreas has been giving
interviews to German local media. The tram driver used an interview with local
tabloid Express to appeal to the suspect in Maddie's case to come clean:
"I just want clarity. I am appealing to you, the
suspect: 'Say what you know!'"
British daily The Guardian was quick to pick up René's case
as well, comparing it to that of Inga Gehricke (pictured above), who
disappeared in 2015 near the town of Stendhal in eastern Germany. The five-year-old
was attending an event with her parents, walked off into the woods with other
children and was never seen again. The local newspaper Die Volksstimme has now
reported that a day after her disappearance, the suspect in the Maddie McCann
case had a minor traffic accident only 100 kilometers (80 miles) from the spot
where Inga was last seen.
Some 60,000 children are reported missing every year in
Germany: 99% return home — but some never do.
Many cases feature prominently in the national media, like
that of Pascal, who was six years old when he disappeared from Saarbrücken,
along the French-German border, in 2001. He was last seen riding his bicycle to
a fairground nearby. As police began to investigate, a slew of spurious
accusations, false testimonies, and retracted confessions arose. Finally, 13
regulars in a nearby bar were arrested as suspects and put on trial. All of
them testified to having raped and suffocated the boy in the bar and then
burying his body in a gravel pit just across the border in France. But police
found neither the body nor the bicycle — nor any of Pascal's DNA. One of the
accused revoked his confession; the proof became insufficient, and the trial
collapsed.
Twelve-year-old Manuel Schadwald went missing in 1993, on
his way to an amusement park in Berlin. Police were quick to suspect that he
had been abducted. Investigators in The Netherlands said that he may have been
kidnapped by child porn producers. Then, in 1998, a Belgian network mentioned
Manuel in connection with the Marc Dutroux gang, who abducted, abused and
murdered young girls in the 1990s. But no proof materialized that Manuel had
indeed become a victim of that gang.
Eight-year-old Deborah Sassen went missing in 1996 on her
short walk home from school in the western German city of Düsseldorf, where her
family had moved not long before. A major search operation led several
witnesses to come forward and report having seen the girl on a frozen lake
nearby or while she was dragged into a waiting car outside the school. But none
of the testimonies emerged as a clear lead.
Not long after Deborah's disappearance, 11-year-old Annika
Seidel went missing some 300 kilometers southeast, in the Hessian town of
Kelkheim. She was shopping with her mother, went into a pet shop and never came
home. A witness claims to have seen her standing by a car with a license plate
from somewhere in Eastern Europe. In the meantime, Annika's mother passed away
without ever having learned what happened to her daughter.
Hilal Ercan disappeared in 1999 in Hamburg. The 10-year-old
had come home with a good report card, so her mother let her go to the nearby
mall to buy herself some sweets as a reward. Hilal never returned. Her mother
found her hairclips and an earring on the ground near the mall. Passers-by said
they saw a man drag a dark-haired girl by the arm; some said they heard
screams. Hamburg police conducted what turned into the biggest search operation
in decades — in vain.
In 2015 a man who had a history of child abuse confessed to
having abducted and killed Hilal, but later retracted his confession. Another
tip-off led police to dig up a small forest in 2018 searching for the girl's
remains — but again they turned up empty-handed.
Twenty years after his disappearance, Hilal's brother Abbas
Ercan wrote and published a letter addressed to his sister's killer: "I am
pleading with you to end our awful martyrdom, which my parents, my sister and I
have been suffering through for 21 years now. Please put an end to it! Please
face the truth and turn yourself in!"
The families of missing children say that what they need
most is closure — no matter what the truth is.
Cold cases are reexamined regularly over decades.
The network Initiative Vermisste Kinder (Initiative for
Missing Children) has published an online map http://www.vermisste-kinder.de/
with 48 dots designating places in Germany where children have gone missing.
The map includes links with information that relatives or police have provided.
Shocked by the Marc Dutroux cases in Belgium, a concerned
German citizen, Monika Bruhns, started the initiative in 1997 to provide
solidarity and assistance to families searching for missing children. After her
passing, her son Lars took over the organization, which describes itself as an
increasingly strategic and professionally structured organization" helping
fill the gaps it sees in missing child cases.
Lars Bruhns says that police often provide ambiguous
information and are slow to publish statistics. What's worse, he underlines, is
that Germany has no official "Amber Alert" system run by the
authorities, akin to those in neighboring France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and
Luxembourg. He calls this oversight "deplorable" and his organization
is trying to fill the gap by at least operating its own version of an Amber
Alert. Bruhns is not alone in his criticism — numerous experts agree that
concerted action, like a governmental Amber Alert, taken in the first three
hours after such a disappearance is critical in finding the child alive.
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