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Christian Brückner's lawyer has described the excavation of a Hannover allotment by police as "a pure desperate act" in his first statement on the case. Friedrich Sebastian Fülscher, representing the 43-year-old lead suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, issued the statement in response to the two-day search by Braunschweig police at an allotment plot just outside Hannover earlier this week. Federal officers uncovered a sealed cellar on Wednesday. Locals said Brückner had stayed in the area in 2007, the year in which three-year-old Madeleine went missing from Praia da Luz in Portugal. Brückner is currently serving a sentence for drugs charges, but it was revealed on Friday that his lawyers have put in a new bid for his release, meaning he could walk free on January 7. In a statement on Friday, Mr Fülscher called the search "a pure desperate act of the public prosecutor's office". "Apparently, it's hard for investigators to admit they backed the wrong horse," the lawyer said. "My client is silent on the charges, but that doesn't mean he has anything to hide." Discussing the rape of a 72-year-old American woman for which Brückner was jailed for seven years last year, which he continues to deny, Mr Fülscher said it was "totally unusual" for someone to be a both a paedophile and a gerontophile.

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