THE Madeleine McCann suspect has been linked to a sex attack on a girl a month before the Brit toddler disappeared.
A German woman has told police she recognised Christian B from TV reports as the man who attacked her in April 2007 when she was ten.
She was on a family holiday in Salema, six miles from Praia da Luz in Portugal where Madeleine vanished aged three.
The woman, now 23, said a man grabbed her on the beach. He performed a sex act on himself and then ran off.
Her brother and father failed to catch him.
Christian B, 43, was identified this year by German police as the main suspect in Madeleine’s abduction, claiming they had “concrete evidence” she is dead.
The German has previously been accused of performing sex acts in playgrounds.
Prosecutors in Brunswick examining the Madeleine case have reopened the file on the woman’s attack.
Prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters said: “The man currently in custody suspected of Madeleine McCann’s abduction is also the suspect in a sex attack on a German girl.”
Christian B has convictions for child sex abuse and was found guilty of raping an American woman, 73, in 2005 close to where Madeleine vanished.
But his lawyer Friedrich Fulscher says he is innocent of the rape and has appealed, and has nothing to do with Madeleine.
He is in jail in Kiel, Germany, serving 21 months for drug offences.
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