Nancy Mestre case: the killer found by the young woman’s father is extradited to Colombia after a 26-year search

The Chancery of Colombia announced this Thursday the extradition of the murderer of Nancy Masteran 18-year-old girl who was beaten, raped and shot by her boyfriend while celebrating the New Year in 1994 and whose case shocked Colombia in those years.

Through the Colombian ambassador in BrazilGuillermo Rivera, it was announced that Jaime Saade would be transferred from Brazil this Thursday morning to be placed at the disposal of the Justice Department in the city of Barranquilla.

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“The Brazilian authorities have already handed over Mr. Jaime Saade, who was convicted by Colombian justice for the murder and sexual abuse of young Nancy Mestre in the 90s,” explained Rivera in a video shared on X.

“Right now he is being transferred to Colombian territory to be placed in the hands of a judge in the city of Barranquilla. And as a consequence of that, he served his sentence in a Colombian penitentiary center,” he added.

Saade was arrested by Interpol in 2020 in Belo HorizonteBrazil, largely thanks to the search for the victim’s father, Martin Masterwho spent nearly three decades trying to track down the killer after he fled Colombia.

Ambassador Rivera acknowledged that the young woman’s father “was instrumental in achieving justice in this case.”

Saade is sentenced to 27 years in prison, handed down in 1996 in Colombia. But the Colombian fled to Brazil, where he settled and lived a normal life under the false name of Henrique dos Santos Abdala until he was found by Nancy Mestre’s father.

Jaime Saade is extradited almost 40 years after the murder of Nancy Mestre.

The crime

Nancythe youngest daughter of TeacherHe wanted to be a diplomat and move from Colombia to the United States to attend university.

“She was a happy girl, very studious. She always read. She wanted to study international law and diplomacy,” Mestre told BBC Brasil in 2022.

But all of the 18-year-old’s plans were interrupted in the early hours of January 1, 1994.

That night, Nancy, her father, mother, and brother toasted the New Year at home. Shortly afterwards, the Master said goodbye to his daughter, who asked to continue celebrating the New Year with her boyfriend, Jaime Saade. The boy had gone to look for her at her house.

“Come back before 3 am”, the Master asked his daughter. “Take good care of her,” he asked Jaime.

Nancy Mestre was a very happy and hopeful young woman, says her father. (PERSONAL ARCHIVE).

At 6am, Master woke up scared. “As soon as I woke up, I felt something,” he says. He went looking around the house for Nancy and found her room empty.

He went out into the street and started looking in nightclubs to see if the young couple were there, but he didn’t find them. Anxiety grew, and as he asked passersby about his daughter, he silently prayed that she appeared safe and sound.

Finally, he decided to go to Saade’s parents’ house, where the young man also lived. There found his mother cleaning the floor. “It was dark and I didn’t realize at the time that I was stepping on my own daughter’s blood. And that the killer’s mother was violating the crime scene.”

“Her daughter had an accident and is at Clínica Caribe,” said the woman.

Master rushed to the hospital and found Saade’s father there. “Your daughter attempted suicide and is in the operating room,” he said. In the emergency room, Doctors were trying to stabilize Nancy, who was in a coma.

The young woman had been taken to the hospital by her boyfriend, her father and a woman who also lived in the family home. They wrapped Nancy, who was naked, in a sheet and placed her in the back of a pickup truck.

Mestre had continued the New Year celebrations at her boyfriend’s house in 1994. (PERSONAL ARCHIVE).

“It was little by little that I began to organize what had happened in my head. They raped, abused and threw her in the back of a truck. I said: ‘My God, what did they do to my daughter!’ “, remembers Master.

This was followed by eight days of agony in the hospital. The young woman never regained consciousness.

“The doctors told me she would go away. I, Nancy’s mother and our other son, Martín, met in the hospital room and prayed and sang songs that she loved listening to as a child”, remembers the father.

Suddenly, his heart stopped beating.

The scape

While Nancy’s parents were suffering in the hospital and the police were investigating what had happened to the young woman on that January 1st, the main suspect in the crime, Jaime Saade, fled Colombia.

“Jaime began his escape on the same day as the murder and was never seen in the country again”, says Mestre. Police ruled out suicide. Nancy died from a gunshot to the head, which hit her right temple.

Traces of gunpowder were found on his left hand, an indication, according to Colombian authorities, that he tried to defend himself.

The young woman was right-handed and would have had to make a very unlikely move, according to the police, to shoot herself in the right temple while carrying the gun with her left hand.

The investigation concluded that Nancy was raped. I had wounds all over the body and on the broken nails there were traces of skin, another sign that tried to defend himself.

In 1996, two years after the young woman’s death, A Colombian court sentenced Jaime Saade to 27 years in prison for murder and rape.

Jaime Saade was tried in absentia and sentenced to 27 years in prison in 1996.

According to the Colombian justice decision, after raping and shooting Nancy in the head, Saade would have become desperate and asked his father for help. They wrapped the young woman’s naked body in a sheet and took her to the hospital. The young man’s father stayed at the clinic while his son hid.

From that moment on, the focus of the Master’s life became finding Saade, a hunt that would last 26 years. “I knew it might take a while, but I always knew I would find my daughter’s killer.”

The investigations

Nancy’s death forever changed the family’s destiny. Master and his wife separated. The couple’s only living child moved to the United States.

And the Master, who is an architect and teacher, He focused almost all of his time and energy on searching for Saade. He enrolled in intelligence courses and reclaimed the knowledge he learned as a Navy officer to use in his investigative efforts.

“I created four fictional characters, two men and two women, and I started to establish contact on social media with Jaime’s relatives to gain trust and obtain information that could lead me to him,” he explained to BBC Brasil.

Mestre passed on all the details he could get to the Colombian police and Interpol. Over the course of the 26-year search, different authorities took on the case.

“Every time the person responsible for the investigation changed, I went there with all the documents to update the person responsible for everything.”

From left to right, the father, mother, brother and Nancy. (PERSONAL ARCHIVE).

In conversations he had with the suspect’s family members through fake profiles, Mestre found two clues that led him to believe that Jaime could be in Brazilian territory.

First, he discovered that Saade’s brother lives in Brazil. So he became suspicious of the frequent mention of the word Santa Marta for your family. Santa Marta is a coastal city in Colombia, with a beach called Bello Horizonte.

Through his investigation he finally came to the conclusion that Saade could be in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte (440 kilometers north of Rio de Janeiro) and not in Santa Marta, Colombia.

With this information, the Brazilian Federal Police and Interpol located a person with a profile similar to that of Jaime Saade.

The prison

The police followed the suspect to a coffee shop and, after leaving the establishment, collected the glass he was drinking from. they wanted check if the fingerprints match with those of the Colombian convicted of Nancy’s murder. They were identical.

When they approached Saade, he presented false documents and said his name was Henrique dos Santos Abdala. He lived a quiet life in Belo Horizonte, with a Brazilian wife and two adult children. He was arrested by the Federal Police and became responsible in Brazil for the crime of identity forgery.

Shortly afterwards, the Colombian government presented an extradition request so that Jaime could serve a 27-year sentence in the country.

“When the director of Interpol called me to inform me of the arrest, I knelt on the ground and began to thank God. My God! After almost 27 years there will be justice”, recalls Mestre.

“I called my other son, Martín, who lives in the United States, and his mother, who now lives in Spain, and we all started crying.”

For Mestre, it would be a matter of months before Saade began serving his sentence in Colombia. All that was needed was authorization from the STF for extradition.

But something very different from what I expected happened.

Jaime Saade fled to Brazil and lived under a false identity for more than 20 years.

The STF decided not to extradite Saade because the crime he committed had expired in Brazil: The statute of limitations for punitive action in that case, a homicide, was 20 years. Saade was found 26 years after Nancy’s death.

But the decision in the STF was not by majority, but by a draw. Two interpretations divided the ministers present.

Brazilian law prohibits extradition if the crime has expired in Brazil. But the legislation also says that if the person commits another crime later, the statute of limitations for the first is interrupted.

Saade had committed the crime of falsifying identity and documents, which he did in order to escape. With this, he could stay in Brazil, without any punishment for the death of Nancy Mestre.

But the young woman’s father, with the support of the Colombian authorities, appealed the decision and on March 31 of last year the STF annulled the decision that prevented her extradition.

Finally, after three decades of efforts, Martín Mestre managed to get Jaime Saade to answer to the Colombian justice system in the case of his brutally murdered 18-year-old daughter.

*Based on a report by Nathalia Passarinho for BBC News Brasil.

Source: Elcomercio