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The man accused of murdering and mutilating a British teenager in Brazil yesterday took police frogmen to a remote jungle river to try to find the girl's dismembered remains.
Mohammed Carvalho dos Santos, 20, spent four hours with police divers after he admitted killing 17-year-old Cara Burke, from south London, in a cocaine-fuelled rage.
He has told police he put the body parts in plastic bags and threw them in the river. He had put her torso in a suitcase which he left on the riverbank, and it was the discovery of the case which led to the murder probe and his arrest.
Grinning killer: Mohamed D'Ali Carvalho Santos, centre, leads police to the site where he allegedly dumped some body parts of British teenager Cara Marie Burke
But after the four-hour trawl yesterday, police admitted they had drawn a blank.
Earlier, dos Santos had smiled in silence with his head bowed as he left a police station in the central Brazilian city of Goiania for the river outside the town where he said he had dumped the girl's head, arms and legs.
He responded angrily to the media later while showing police around the river and the 40-yard-long bridge spanning it.
Asked where he was standing on the bridge when he threw bags of body parts over the side, Santos snarled at a reporter, 'I threw her in your house.'
Murdered: British teenager Marie Burke, 17, was reportedly stabbed to death before being decapitated
Firefighters joined police in combing the banks of the river for the missing remains, without success.
Detectives said they were now convinced that dos Santos, 20, carried out the horrific murder because Cara had refused to marry him so that he could gain entry to Britain.
They had earlier believed the motive may have been that Cara had planned to go to the police about his drug use and dealing.
Chief investigating officer Carlos Batista said: 'His friends and her friends have told us that he wanted her to marry him so that he could live permanently in the UK. He had already been there a couple of years and really liked it.
'She was not prepared to marry him and they argued a lot.'
Cara, whom friends described as 'very naive' and 'obsessed with Brazil', is believed to have met dos Santos in east London, where he was living illegally.
When he was thrown out of Britain earlier this year, he suggested Cara travel with him to Brazil, in the hope that the pair would get married and he could obtain British citizenship.
The couple spent three months living together in a flat in the central Brazilian city of Goiania before they fell out. Two weeks ago Cara moved in with a female friend in the city but returned to the flat last weekend.
Grieving: Cara's brother Michael and mother Anne (third left) leave the family home in London
Her boyfriend was born in Brazil, but police said his parents live in the UK, and that he had met Cara in Britain.
They say he quickly confessed to murdering her, and that he had taken pictures of her mutilated body on his mobile phone.
However last night he claimed that he did not kill 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 from his cell in a telephone interview with the Sun.
He told the newspaper that he was never romantically involved with Cara. He said 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,' said Dos Santos.
'She moved in with me but she was never my boyfriend [sic]. We lived together for about two months and then she moved out because she had another boyfriend.'
Cara pictured with a young friend
Yesterday Mr Batista, chief of Goiania's murder division, said that dos Santos stabbed Cara 'several times in the chest and the back' last Saturday after taking a huge amount of crack cocaine.
Dos Santos said last night that he does not remember what happened the night Cara died because he was too high on cocaine.
He said: 'I don't remember much, I had used too much drugs.'
A screen projection of a photo of Cara and Dos Santos recovered by police from his mobile phone
After murdering her, dos Santos went out to get drunk at a party, then returned to his apartment and hacked off Cara's head, arms and legs.
He then stuffed the teenager's torso into a medium-sized black suitcase which he dumped in a river outside town. Police believe he had an accomplice named only as Jorge, who was last night being hunted.
He is thought to have helped in the disposal of the body parts, but not in the murder.
Rescue workers search for body parts in the river near where Cara's body was found
The suitcase was discovered last Monday and was identified by a tattoo reading 'Mum'. The rest of Cara's body - including her head - have still not been found.
Shockingly, dos Santos is said to have told detectives dismembering his girlfriend's body was ''just like cutting beef, but for the bleeding.'
When asked what motivated him to dismember the corpse, he said it was his desperation to remove the body from the apartment.
'The best method I could think of was putting her inside the suitcase.'
The 17-year-old's dismembered body was found in the Brazilian city of Goiania
And asked why he took a photograph of the body and the knife, he is reported to have said: 'I took them in order to send to a Brazilian in England, who she stole money from. He said he was going to kill her.
'I was going to send them by email to show him that although he didn't have the courage to do it, someone here did.'
According to the newspaper Hoje Noticia, as well as photographs of the remains, Santos' mobile phone contained pictures of Chucky, the killer doll from the Child's Play series of films.
Liverpool toddler James Bulger's 10-year-old killers, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, were said to have been influenced by one of the films.
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