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A Florida businessman has been charged with kidnapping and murdering his wife in Spain over eight months after she first went missing.
US citizen Ana Maria Henao Knezevich went missing in February in Madrid, Spain and has not been seen since. Now, a grand jury has indicted her husband, 36-year-old IT specialist David Knezevich, on charges of kidnapping resulting in death, foreign domestic violence resulting in death and foreign murder of a United States national.
Knezevich, who was arrested in May after flying into Miami International Airport from Serbia, was originally charged with kidnapping resulting in death.
Ana’s friends and family said she flew from Florida to Spain in December 2023 after splitting with her husband, People reports. They were married for 13 years.
Her brother Felipe called it a “nasty divorce” with a “substantial amount of money on the line.”
Sanna Rameau told People that her best friend Ana’s goal was to start a non-profit for women who faced abuse in Spain.
“She wanted the divorce to go through, and she said that’s what she wanted to do after splitting up everything,” Rameau told the outlet.
The 40-year-old was last seen on February 2 entering her Madrid apartment. That evening, surveillance footage showed a man entering the building and spray-painting the security cameras, People reports.
Footage appeared to show him “fastening a piece of duct tape to the lock of the building entrance to prevent the lock from engaging to allow subsequent entry,” according to the federal complaint reviewed by People. An hour later, he walked off an elevator in the building with a suitcase.
Authorities later said they believe this man was Knezevich, People reports. Investigators say he flew from Istanbul, to Miami and then to Serbia in late January. From there, they claim he drove to Spain and kidnapped Ana.
Court documents previously reviewed by The Independent indicate Ana’s friends received suspicious texts the day after her disappearance explaining she was running off for a few days with a man she had recently met.
“I met someone wonderful”, the message said in Spanish. “He has a summer house about 2h from Madrid. We are going there now and I will spend a few days there. There is barely any signal though. I’ll call you when I come back. Kisses.”
Her friends told the police they did not think Ana had written them.
A month after Ana vanished, an insurance provider also got a call from someone claiming to be her, asking for three insurance policies related to the couple’s IT support business in Fort Lauderdale, Florida to be canceled, court documents revealed.
“During the call, children could be heard in the background speaking to the caller,” the documents said. “The victim does not have any children.”
The phone number used to make the call was registered to Knezevich, the FBI said, and is linked to the business.
Knezevich’s attorneys told People the new charges are “a desperate attempt by the government to charge everything possible and see what sticks.” He will plead not guilty at his arraignment, which is scheduled for next week.
“There is no evidence that David Knezevich kidnapped or murdered his wife,” attorneys Christopher Cavallo, Jayne Weintraub and Bruce Zimet said in a statement.
Ana’s brother Diego Henao weclomed the new charges. “This is a step in the direction to start to mourn while we continue to search for answers and honor Ana’s memory by advocating for her story to be told, and for accountability to prevail,” Henao said in a statement per NBC.
Source: independent.co.uk
