Christian B, 49, was smuggled from a jail near Hanover, hidden in the back of his lawyer’s car and managed to avoid being filmed or pictured by scores of camera operators who had been waiting for several days.
But a photographer caught up with him as he stopped briefly at a McDonald’s restaurant.
Read more: Madeleine McCann suspect released after serving rape sentence
Christian B, who cannot be fully identified under German privacy laws, stood outside and smoked a cigarette before eating his food.
Dressed in a lilac shirt, beige trousers and trainers, he ordered chicken nuggets with sweet-and-sour sauce, a burger and a hot drink.
He wore sunglasses, but they did little to disguise the distinctive features that have appeared on TV and on the front of newspapers around the world.
After 15 minutes, he left the restaurant as police blocked the street to allow him to leave freely.
He was driven off again in the black Audi saloon in which his lawyer Friedrich Fulscher had collected him an hour earlier from Sehnde prison.
It’s not known where Christian B was headed after completing an unrelated sentence for the rape of an elderly woman, or who will help him adjust to his new life of freedom.
As part of his release conditions, he’s been fitted with an electronic ankle tag, has had to surrender his passport and register his permanent address with probation officers.
Another of his lawyers, Philipp Marquort, said: “This is an attempt by the public prosecutor’s office to keep him in a kind of pre-trial detention where they would have access to him at any time. We will not accept that.”
German prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters, who leads the Madeleine investigation, believes Christian B abducted and murdered the three-year-old during a family holiday in Portugal in 2007.
The suspect, who has convictions for child sex abuse, theft, drug trafficking and forgery, denies any involvement.
Explainer: The chequered history of Christian B
Madeleine vanished from her bed in a rented apartment as her parents and their friends dined nearby at the hotel complex in Praia da Luz.
Mr Wolters told Sky News he had “almost” enough evidence to charge the suspect, but could not justify arresting him and stopping him from being freed.
He said: “He is dangerous, a psychopath, and we hope he does not commit more crimes, but it is likely he will.”
He said he hadn’t ruled out the chance of charging Christian B: “At the moment, we still have lines of investigation we are pursuing, and we hope we may gain more evidence or indications.
“If that happens, our situation would of course improve, and we would prefer to go to court with that stronger position.”
Christian B, who flitted between Germany and Portugal, has served seven years for the rape of a 72-year-old American woman in Praia da Luz – two years before Madeleine vanished.
He is expected to appear in a German court next month to face a charge of using insulting behaviour towards a female prison warder. A conviction could put him back in jail.
He also faces a possible retrial after the prosecutor’s appeal against his acquittal last year on unrelated rape and child sex allegations.
Scotland Yard detectives, who failed to charge anyone in their own investigation, revealed this week they had asked Christian B to answer their questions, but he refused, as he has with their German and Portuguese colleagues.
His lawyers dismissed it as an illegal request because investigators had shared none of the prosecution files with him.
According to the prosecutor, the evidence against Christian B in the Madeleine case is circumstantial; his mobile phone was nearby her apartment at the time she vanished, he was a convicted child sex abuser, he had allegedly confessed to a friend, and he had re-registered his car the day after.
There is no forensic evidence to link the suspect to the abduction – and after 18 years, the chances of finding it must be remote.
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German criminal profiler Mark T Hofmann told Sky News: “I’m a big believer in second chances, but I’m not that much of a big believer in tenth chances.
“So if you commit a crime, and you do it again and again and again and again, then you need to ask yourself like, why should we believe that he will stop now?
“I wish, and I hope that also he realises that he can maybe now live a different life anonymously in some place, and hopefully stop committing crimes.”
Madeleine’s parents Kate and Gerry McCann, from Leicestershire, cling to the hope their daughter might still be found alive, in the absence of any evidence they are aware of to show she is dead.
