Another very grisly case of bodily mutilation and separation reported not long after the carnage on that Greyhound bus:
August 1, 2008 Killer said dismembering Cara Burke was 'like cutting beef', paper claims Brazilian police say accused man Mohammed dos Santos has confessed to murder, but he tells British newspaper 'it wasn't me'
David Brown
A man accused of dismembering the body of the British teenager Cara Burke is reported to have described how it was “just like cutting beef”.
Mohammed Dali Carvalho dos Santos, 20, admitted killing Cara after she threatened to tell his parents in London that he was a drug dealer, Brazilian police have claimed.
Detectives today paraded Mr dos Santos, from Hackney, East London, to journalists in Goiânia, central Brazil.
He is alleged to have taken pictures of Cara's dismembered corpse using his mobile telephone with the intention of sending them to a friend in Britain.
When was asked by a Brazilian newspaper how he felt about dismembering Cara's body he is alleged to have replied: “Nothing, just like cutting beef, except for the bleeding”.
Asked why he took photographs of himself dismembering the corpse he said: “I took them to send to a Brazilian friend in England, who she [Cara] had stolen money from. He said he was going to kill her.”
“I was going to send them to him by e-mail to show that although he didn't have the courage to do it, someone here did,” he is reported to have said during an interview in jail with the local newspaper, Hoje Noticia.
However, when paraded in front of journalists he denied murder and said: “I don't know anything about that.”
Cara, 17, from Southfields, south-west London, arrived in Brazil three months ago. Her torso was found in a suitcase dumped beside a river in Goiânia on Monday. Her head, arms and legs are still missing.
Mr dos Santos allegedly told police he murdered Cara on Saturday night, left her body in the bath and went to a party before decapitating her the following day.
He was reported to have said: “I made a mistake, the suitcase was supposed to fall in the river. If it had fallen in the river nobody would have found it, as they haven't found the head and the other parts.”
During an interview with The Sun on Thursday night he repeated his denial of murdering Cara.
“I was in my apartment when something happened. She got killed there but I can't say what happened. It wasn't me,” he said.
Mr dos Santos said he was never romantically involved with Cara and that she had flown out to be with another Brazilian who had paid for her ticket and was furious that she later ended their relationship.
“He said he was going to kill her because she spent so much on the ticket,” he said. “She moved in with me but she was never my girlfriend We lived together for about two months and then she moved out because she had another boyfriend.”
"A cult is a religion with no political power." -Tom Wolfe Pardon me for sounding like a dick, but I'm playing the tiniest violin in the world right now-Dalton
