Colombia: an American arrested for the murder of his fiancée

An American suspected of having murdered his Colombian girlfriend in Bogota has been deported from Panama to Colombia where he will be prosecuted, we learned Thursday from an official source.

“John Nelson Poulos, a US citizen, was captured for his alleged involvement in the murder of young Valentina Trespalacios, which occurred over the past weekend in Bogota,” the attorney general’s office said on Twitter.

The case has aroused great emotion in Colombia. The body of the 23-year-old, a locally known DJ, was found Sunday in a trash can in a western district of the capital.

The suspect, her boyfriend of less than a year, fled to Panama after the crime, where he was arrested at the capital’s airport as he prepared to board a flight to Turkey .

Mr. Poulos was extradited to Bogota on Wednesday, where he was immediately arrested by the police. Photographs released by local authorities showed the suspect tied behind his back with purple handcuffs, a symbol of the fight against violence against women.

This “foreign citizen will remain in prison (…) and will be brought before a judge, the prosecutor’s office said.

According to relatives of the victim, he had been staying in Bogota for a week and had promised to settle with her.

Security camera footage, released by national media, showed Mr. Poulos exiting his rental apartment, pushing a shopping cart with a large suitcase inside, visibly containing the young woman’s body, then putting the suitcase in the trunk of his car.

On Wednesday evening, relatives and dozens of people paid tribute to Valentina Trespalacios in the neighborhood where her body was found, placing candles in front of the black trash can where the corpse was dumped.

According to official statistics, 100 cases of feminicide were recorded in 2022 in this country of 50 million inhabitants. The Colombian Feminicide Observatory, a civil society initiative, says the figure rises to 612 cases for the same period.

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