An American citizen was found guilty of the 2023 femicide of a well-known Colombian DJ, whose body was found in a garbage can in the capital Bogota, and was sentenced on Tuesday to serve a prison sentence of more than 42 years.

A prosecutor “proved during the trial that the foreigner took the young woman to an apartment in the northern part of the city and that, in a fit of jealousy, he beat her and suffocated her,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

John Nelson Poulos was arrested at the end of January 2023 at an airport in Panama, as he was trying to escape from the Colombian authorities who wanted him for the murder.

Valentina Trespalassios, 23, was his partner for just under a year.

CCTV footage, played by Colombian media, shows Mr Poulos leaving an apartment pushing a trolley with a large suitcase, inside which he had apparently placed the young woman’s body, then placing the suitcase in his luggage compartment his car.

The Trespalasios case caused an uproar and strong reactions in the country of 50 million people where, according to the Colombian Observatory on Femicide, a non-governmental organization, 612 femicides were committed in 2022. The authorities, for their part, counted 100.