Jaime Saade, the man convicted of killing Colombian Nancy Mestre almost 30 years ago, is arrested in Brazil

The authorities in Brazil confirmed the arrest of Jaime Saade, the man accused of killing the young Colombian Nancy Mestre almost 30 years ago.

Saade was arrested in the coastal municipality of Marechal Deodoro, in the state of Alagoas, two weeks after Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (STF) approved his extradition to Colombia.

Once Saade returns to Colombia, he will have to serve the 27-year prison sentence to which he was sentenced in 1996 for the rape and murder of Mestre, which occurred in January 1994.

Nancy’s father, Martín Mestre, spent 26 years searching for Saade, who fled after the crime, until he found him in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where he was arrested by Interpol in 2020.

The killer lived a normal and comfortable life under the false name of Henrique dos Santos Abdala. He is married to a Brazilian woman and has two children.

A few months after his arrest, the STF denied Saade’s extradition on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired in Brazil, although this decision was reversed in April.

Nancy, Mestre’s youngest daughter, wanted to be a diplomat and move from Colombia to the United States to attend university.

The father jokingly said that he would not leave her: “I want you near us.” But in truth, he admired her daughter’s ambition and would do whatever he could to help her achieve that dream.

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

But all the plans of the 18-year-old girl were cut short in the early morning of January 1, 1994. Nancy, her father, her mother, and her brother toasted the new year at home.

Shortly after midnight, Mestre said goodbye to his daughter, who asked to continue the New Year’s celebration with her boyfriend, Jamie Saade. The boy had gone to look for her at her house.

“Come back before 3 am,” Mestre asked his daughter. “Take good care of her”, she asked Jaime.

At 6 am, Mestre woke up with a start. “As soon as I woke up, I felt something,” he says. He went looking for Nancy around the house and found her room empty of hers.

He went out into the street and started looking in nightclubs to see if the young couple were there, but he couldn’t find them. Her anxiety grew and she, as she inquired about her daughter whom she had come across, silently prayed that she would appear safe and sound.

Finally, he decided to go to Jaime’s parents’ house, where the young man also lived.

There he 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 mother of the murderer was raping the crime scene.”

“Her daughter had an accident and is in the Caribbean Clinic,” said the woman.

Mestre rushed to the hospital and found Jaime’s father there. “Your daughter tried to commit suicide and she’s in the operating room,” he told her. 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 Jaime, her father and a woman who also lived in the family home. They wrapped a naked Nancy in a sheet and put her in the bed of a pickup truck.

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

That was followed by eight agonizing days in the hospital. The young Ella never regained consciousness.

“The doctors told me that she was going to leave. Me, Nancy’s mom, and our other son, Martin, would get together in the hospital room and pray and sing songs that she loved to listen to as a child.”

Suddenly, his heart stopped beating.

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

“Jaime began his flight the same day of the murder and he was never seen again in the country,” Mestre told BBC News Brazil in 2022. The police ruled out the theory of suicide. Nancy died from a shot to the head, which entered her right temple.

Remnants 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 highly unlikely move, according to police, to shoot herself in the right temple while carrying the gun with her left hand.

The investigation concluded that Nancy had been raped. She had wounds all over her body and on her broken fingernails there were scraps of skin, another sign that she tried to defend herself against her.

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.

According to Colombian justice, after raping and shooting Nancy in the head, Jaime asked his father for help. They wrapped the naked body of the young woman in a sheet and took her to the hospital. Jaime’s father stayed at the clinic while his son hid.

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

Since Jaime Saade’s conviction, Mestre has been in frequent contact with Colombian authorities and Interpol to share information he himself found.

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

And Mestre, who is an architect and a professor, focused almost all of his time and energy on the search for Jaime. He entered intelligence service courses and retrieved the knowledge he had learned as a naval officer to use in his investigative efforts.

“I created four fictitious characters, two men and two women, and I began to establish contact on social networks with Jaime’s relatives to gain their trust and obtain information that could lead me to him,” he explained to BBC News Brazil.

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

“Every time the person in charge of the investigation changed, I would go there with all the documents to update the person on everything.”

From the conversations he had with Jaime’s relatives using the false profiles, Mestre came to the conclusion that the man 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 officers followed the suspect to a coffee shop and, after leaving the establishment, collected the cup he used to drink. They wanted to verify that the fingerprints matched those of the Colombian convicted of Nancy’s murder. They were identical.

He was arrested by the Federal Police and began responding in Brazil for the crime of falsifying identity.

Shortly thereafter, the Colombian government submitted an extradition request so that Jaime could serve his 27-year sentence in the country.

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

“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.”

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

But something very different from what I expected happened.

On September 28, 2020, Mestre received a call from a lawyer.

The STF had decided not to extradite Jaime because the crime he had committed had prescribed in Brazil: the statute of limitations for the punitive claim in that case, a murder, was 20 years. Jaime had been found 26 years after Nancy’s death.

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

Brazilian law prohibits extradition if the crime prescribed in Brazil. But the legislation also says that if the person commits another crime later, the prescription of the first one is interrupted.

Jaime had committed the crime of falsifying identity and documents, something he did to escape.

“My client, Jaime, had not even been denounced by the Public Ministry at the time the STF was judging the case,” his lawyer, Fernando Gomes de Oliveira, told BBC Brasil last year.

JAime Saade was able to stay in Brazilwithout any punishment for the death of Nancy Mestre.

The STF’s decision became final and the Colombian government did not appeal. But Martín Mestre did not lose hope and found an international office that set out to find one last alternative.

Mestre filed a challenge in which he asked the ministers to review the decision.

And the appeal took effect because the STF minister Alexandre de Moraes ruled last March that the young woman’s father did have the right to file a rescission action and voted in favor of reviewing the decision that prevented the extradition.

On Tuesday, April 18, the STF finally approved the extradition, giving Martín Mestre the satisfaction that justice will finally be done in his daughter’s case.

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