Nancy Mariana Mestre, an 18-year-old teenager, was raped and murdered more than a quarter of a century ago in Colombia. During all this time his father, Martín Mestre, did everything possible to find the murderer, until he found him in Brazil, hiding under another identity. Now he finally cherishes the possibility of hunting him.
The crime occurred on January 1, 1994, in Barranquilla, Colombia, when Jaime Saade, who was Nancy's partner (and was 13 years older than her), allegedly shot the young woman in the head.
The day before, on New Year's Eve, the young woman had told great news to her father, who remembers that Nancy came home and said, "Daddy, I have two pieces of news for you, one good and one bad. The good news is that I passed the English test." He then asked her what the bad one was. "I'm going to the United States," he replied, the man told the newspaper El Tiempo.
She asked permission to spend the night with Saade, and the man told her to come back before 3 a.m. When he hadn't returned at 6 a.m., he knew something was wrong.
Jaime Saade.Interpol
Hours later he found his daughter in the hospital with a gunshot wound to the head and days later, on January 9, she died. The coroner's report determined that she had been sexually assaulted and murdered.
Mestre searched for Saade for 26 years for justice, until one day he discovered that he was hiding in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte under the name Henrique Dos Santos. Thanks to a fingerprint on a glass glass, police determined his identity and Interpol arrested him in 2020.
Her mother kidnapped her for 6 years: thanks to a Netflix series they find a missing girl
May 17, 202301:45
Colombia then requested extradition to serve a 27-year sentence for Nancy's murder. But a year later, Brazil's Supreme Court voted against it. Until last April 18 the court finally gave the green light to the extradition of Saade and on May 1, the Federal Police of Brazil confirmed that he was captured in a pension in the municipality of Marechal Deodoro, in Alagoas, 1,242 miles from Belo Horizonte, after three days on the run.
"I am very excited, justice is finally going to be done," Mestre told El Pais newspaper after receiving news of the arrest. "I started crying, I didn't know why I was crying, if it was emotion or anger, I just cried and cried," she told El Tiempo.
Saade's wife, Maria Dias, called her husband's conviction unjust. "He was framed by everyone but they have no proof. He was in her house, he didn't kill her," she told W Radio.
