Handcuffed and with gray hair, Jaime Saade Cormane arrived at the Bogotá international airport on Thursday, after remaining a fugitive from Colombian justice for 30 years for the murder of a young woman in the north of the country, the immigration authority reported.
Over the years, Saade not only changed his appearance, leaving behind the young man with black hair who appeared on the fugitive posters, he also changed his identity to Henrique Dos Santos Adbala and hid in Brazil, a country that extradited him to Colombia.
Upon arriving in Bogotá on a commercial flight, Saade complied with the immigration processes and was then left in the hands of the authorities to answer for a 24-year prison sentence for the murder of Nancy Mariana Mestre.
In the early morning of January 1, 1994, after the New Year celebration, Saade asked Mestre out. The 18-year-old girl's father gave her permission on the condition that she return at dawn. However, as the hours passed, the distraught father began searching for his daughter, whom he finally found injured in a clinic in the Caribbean city of Barranquilla.
Nine days later, Mestre died as a result of a wound to the skull caused by a firearm projectile, as indicated in the 1996 conviction against Saade, declared responsible for the crime of homicide with violent carnal access.
Martín Mestre, the victim's father, has since dedicated himself to searching for Saade, who disappeared since the crime without a trace and was later convicted in absentia.
Over the decades that followed, Mestre, an architect and Navy reservist, honed his investigative skills and alerted authorities to any leads, until they realized one of his brothers lived in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
“Together with a counterintelligence expert, we infiltrated four people into the family, fictitious people: two with Arabic names and two with names of friends to give them confidence,” the victim's father told the television program in 2021. The Informants.
Saade was captured in 2020 in Brazil due to an extradition request made by Colombia. However, he was not immediately endorsed by the high courts of that country and was freed.
The process continued and although his lawyers tried to request the statute of limitations for his crimes in Colombia, the request was denied. In 2023 he was recaptured in Brazil in compliance with a red notice from Interpol and his extradition was later endorsed.
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