The Chilean Nicolás Zepeda, accused of having killed his ex-Japanese girlfriend Narumi Kurosaki in 2016, was charged with murder and was placed in preventive detention this Friday in France, after being extradited from our country
“Nicolás Zepeda was charged with the murder of Narumi Kurosaki,” announced Etienne Manteaux, prosecutor in Besançon, the eastern city of France where the 21-year-old Japanese woman disappeared almost four years ago.
The 29-year-old Chilean citizen arrived in Paris this Friday morning and was immediately transferred to Besançon, where, after questioning him, the investigating judge, Marjolaine Poinsard, decided to charge him with murder and order his preventive detention.
Zepeda, who so far denies killing his ex-girlfriend, is the only suspect in the disappearance of Kurosaki, whose trail was lost on December 6, 2016 at a university residence in Besançon.
Although her body has not been found, investigators assume that the young woman is probably dead.
According to investigators, Zepeda, a member of a wealthy Chilean family, traveled to France especially to commit the crime after learning that Kurosaki, whom he met during a trip to Japan in 2014, had a new romantic relationship.
According to the investigation, the previous days he bought flammable material, followed the victim and the night of the alleged crime invited her to lunch and then went with her to the student home, where he would have suffocated her by strangling her.
Subsequently, he would have put his body in a suitcase and hidden in a nearby forest.
In order to prepare this account, the French courts carried out the triangulation of the GPS of the car that Zepeda rented in France, reviewed images from cameras of commercial premises and the purchases he made with his credit card.
Students at the residence told investigators they heard “screams of terror” on the night of his disappearance, but no one called the police.
The extradition of this commercial engineer ended the judicial process started in March, when Chile accepted the request of the French justice to open this process against Zepeda.
“The speed with which Chilean justice, also in a context of Covid-19, responded to our request for extradition is exceptional,” said Etienne Manteaux.
Before the Zepeda case, Chile had authorized at least two extraditions of Chileans to France.
In an email he wrote to the Chilean authorities, Zepeda admitted that he went to Besançon in December 2016 to see Narumi and that they both realized that “they were still in love with each other.”
He said he spent part of the night of December 4 with her, but claims that he left the residence alone.
The young Japanese family “hope she will have a different line of defense” this time. “The only thing they care about is getting Narumi’s body back,” her lawyer, Sylvie Galley, told AFP in May.
Narumi was a bright young woman, who came from a modest family. She was studying at a language center in Besançon, which offered her a study grant.
Although in Chile the case did not arouse greater interest, in France and Japan it has been very followed, especially now that the possibility of trying the only accused has opened.
His defense in France will be in charge of Jacqueline Laffont, a renowned lawyer who defended former French President Nicolás Sarkozy in a corruption case.
If there is a trial, it will not be held before next year.
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