Police are closing in on the violent predator who punched and sexually groped a German tourist in Harlem, sources said Saturday.

The tubby creep was being staked out at multiple locations, three days after he pounced on the woman, socking her in the face with his fist so hard that she crumpled to the ground besides a stack of sidewalk trash near her Airbnb rental.

The man stole the woman’s tote bag, but was intent on violence for its own sake, investigators noted.

After leaving her unconscious on the sidewalk and walking away with her bag he turned back and pummeled in the face a few times more, surveillance video shows.

“She’s lucky she’s still alive,” one law enforcement source said Saturday of the woman, 31, who suffered broken teeth and other injuries.

At least two surveillance cameras captured the attacker’s image, one recording the 2:50 a.m. mugging itself — on West 146th Street near Frederick Douglass Boulevard — and another showing him hurrying down the sidewalk with the woman’s bag.

Meanwhile, Manhattan prosecutors have cleared a second man charged a man in an previous violent mugging that happened nearby.

When he was first apprehended, cops hoped that Jesse Hardy, 28, of the Bronx, was linked to both the May 4 attack of the German tourist and the assault and robbery of a 35-year-old woman a few blocks away in a Harlem park late last month.

Now it appears investigators do not have enough to link Hardy to either crime. Cleared in the mugging, he was being held on an additional warrant in Manhattan Criminal Court on Saturday night.

“I have a gun,” that screaming victim was told before also being numerous times and robbed of her handbag.

It is unclear whether police now believe a single assailant committed this earlier mugging, between West 148th and West 149th streets at around 4 a.m. April 24, and the tourist attack on May 4.