/ 2 August 2008

‘The only way out was to cut her up, wasn’t it?’

Even Dr Rhonan Ferreira da Silva, an experienced Brazilian forensic expert, was shocked when the body of British teenager Cara Marie Burke arrived at the city’s central morgue on Monday.

”I’ve never seen anything like it around here,” he said, as he opened refrigerator number 12 where the 17-year-old’s mutilated body is being held. ”We had one decapitation, some time ago. But nothing like this.”

On Friday, as Burke’s body awaited formal identification and her mother prepared to fly out to Brazil from London, police launched an ”unprecedented” manhunt for an alleged accomplice who they claim helped the girl’s confessed killer and apparent boyfriend, Mohammed D’Ali Carvalho dos Santos (20), dispose of her body.

She was stabbed to death in the apartment she shared with Dos Santos last Saturday. Police found the victim’s torso on Monday night in a black suitcase that had been dumped beside a river on the city’s outskirts. There was no sign of the head, arms or lower legs.

”I don’t even know how many times [I stabbed her],” Dos Santos told local newspaper Diario da Manha on Thursday. ”It was more than once. I only stopped when she was dead. I had to get rid of the body quickly. The only way out was to cut her up, wasn’t it? It was just like cutting a piece of meat.”

However, in a prison interview with The Associated Press on Friday afternoon, Dos Santos denied killing Burke, saying he couldn’t remember what had happened as he had been high on cocaine on the night she died. ”I don’t remember much,” he said. ”I had used too much drugs.” He added: ”It wasn’t me … I deny it.”

Burke, who was born in Wandsworth, south London, appears to have met her alleged killer in the United Kingdom two years ago. On April 9 this year she travelled to Brazil and moved in with Dos Santos, described by police as her boyfriend. Despite dreaming of a new life, she spent much of her time in an impoverished suburb called Novo Mundo (New World).

”We don’t have any information yet about what exactly what she was doing here [in Brazil],” said Carlos Raimundo Batista, who is heading the murder investigation. ”But she knew lots of Brazilians from London and she always said that she would like to live in Brazil because of the weather. London is much colder than it is here and she was curious.”

On May 1, she returned to the UK briefly to see her mother, Ann, and her two brothers. But several weeks later, on May 22, she flew back to Goiania, a small city 208km from Brazil’s capital, Brasilia, where 261 people have been murdered this year.

Brazilian police say she fell in with the wrong crowd. Her relationship with her increasingly aggressive boyfriend deteriorated. ”He is a drug user and he was always under the effect of drugs, and he became very aggressive,” Batista said.

Reports in the local press suggest Burke had decided to return to the UK permanently, but after a minor motorcycle accident was forced to postpone her trip home until August 3. ”My mum had paid for the ticket home and we were looking forward to having her back,” her brother Michael told reporters in London.

According to Batista, Burke had walked out on Dos Santos a week before her death after an argument, and moved in with friends. On the Saturday of her murder, Dos Santos allegedly called her on her cellphone, claiming he wanted to make up. According to a female friend who was with Burke at the time and has now fled the city, Dos Santos invited her to a party at his 13th-floor flat that evening.

Later that night, the friend tried to call Burke’s cellphone. ”It went straight to the answer machine,” Batista said.

By then, police say, Dos Santos had already murdered the teenager. Furious that Burke had threatened to report his drug habit to his mother in London and to the police, he reportedly turned up his hi-fi to drown out her screams. The fatal wound was a stab to the left side of her back, which penetrated her heart and her lung, Dr Ferreira da Silva said.

According to Batista, the 20-year-old Brazilian dumped her body in the bathroom, took a shower, and headed out to a party to listen to music with his friends.

”I dragged her body into the bathroom. Then I put the body to one side and I got into the shower and washed … then I locked the apartment and went out to the party,” he told Diario da Manha.

Batista said he suspected from the bloodstains in several different rooms that she had struggled with her killer. ”She doesn’t seem like the kind of girl who would have died without a fight.”

On Sunday, after returning from the party, Dos Santos allegedly set about hiding the body. Using the same kitchen knife he had used to kill her, he hacked off her head, arms and lower legs, before driving to at least two different parts of town and abandoning them near the rivers that flow away from Goiania.

Having discovered part of the teenager’s body, Goiania’s police force was quick to react. Acting on a tip-off, the head of the city’s elite police unit, Major Claudio Oliveira, set out at 3am on Wednesday accompanied by 11 members of his Swat team. The armed group pounced on its suspect outside a bar on Colonia Street, in a suburb notorious for the sale of crack and cocaine. According to Oliveira, he immediately confessed.

”He was lucid,” Oliveira said, adding that Dos Santos had offered the police squad R$70 000 to be released. On Friday, Dos Santos led police to a river outside the city in search of the remaining parts of her body.

Jhon Luiz de Sa, a friend, said: ”She was a cool girl, with a good heart and like all adolescents she had her crazy side.” — guardian.co.uk