Missing Ana’s husband arrested – “I think she was in the suitcase” says Swedish Sanna

Three months ago, Ana Knezevic, 40, disappeared without a trace in Madrid.

Now the FBI has arrested her husband in Florida – so far accused of kidnapping.

Her best friend, Swedish Sanna Rameau, has done everything to find Ana.

But now she says:

– Unfortunately, I believe that she is dead and that she was taken away in the suitcase he carried out.

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Friday 2 February this year was the last time Sanna Rameau in Dalby in Scania spoke to her friend Ana Knezevic on the phone.

They got to know each other in Fort Lauderdale, Florida when Sanna lived and worked there for many years and quickly discovered that they shared the same passion for traveling and discovering new places.

On February 8, Sanna Rameau was going to visit Ana Knezevic in Madrid again – and this summer Ana was to come to Sweden to visit.

That never happened.

Sprayed the cameras

That same evening, an unknown man in a motorcycle helmet sprayed black paint on the surveillance cameras in the entrance to the house in Madrid, where Ana Knezevic rented an apartment.

When two people went out, the man entered.

Since then, Ana has disappeared without a trace.

At first, Spanish police considered the case just a disappearance, but Sanna Rameau and Ana’s other friends immediately sensed trouble.

To get the police to take Ana’s disappearance seriously and deploy all resources, they went out in the international media. The case received a lot of attention, both in the USA, as well as in Spain, Great Britain, Germany – and Sweden.

Then there was silence.

Arrested at the airport

Sanna Rameau, Ana’s family and friends have been forced to live in worry and uncertainty – and sadness.

– We have not been told anything. It has been frustrating and difficult, says Sanna.

The only thing they have known is that Ana is missing.

But – early Monday morning, Sanna Rameau received the news that Ana’s husband was arrested by the FBI at the airport in Miami, Florida, when he arrived on the flight from Serbia, where he has been staying since the end of January.

And then it turned out that the FBI had been quietly cooperating with Spanish as well as Colombian and Serbian police – and had gathered a long line of serious evidence against him.

It was Serbian police who announced that the man would come by plane to Miami – something the FBI was waiting for to get the chance to arrest him.

– It feels like another shock, says Sanna.

Lied about where he was

The man is currently accused of kidnapping his wife – because she has not been found, neither dead nor alive.

The couple, who had been married for 13 years, were going through an acrimonious divorce with large financial assets to divide, including a business and several properties in Florida.

Everything now suggests that the husband carefully and elaborately planned the crime against Ana in Madrid.

In the days after Ana had disappeared, Sanna spoke to him and tried to get him to come to Madrid to help search.

– Then he said he was in Florida, says Sanna.

It wasn’t true.

Changed license plates

In fact, he had already gone to Turkey on January 27 and then continued to Serbia, where he was born.

In the capital Belgrade, he rented a car, a Peugeot 308. On January 30, he left the country with the car – and returned on February 5, three days after Ana disappeared.

According to the rental car company, the man had changed the number plates on the car, tinted the windows and removed stickers from the car.

The car had also covered 768 miles during the time he rented it – from Belgrade to Madrid is 259 miles, one way, a journey that takes about 26 hours.

During the time he is believed to have been in Madrid, a car owner reported having his number plates stolen – the same number plates registered on the street where Ana lived, but on a Peugeot 308 with tinted windows.

However, due to the tinted windows, the driver could not be identified on the surveillance footage.

Bought paint and tape

Another strange coincidence is that just days before he left for Turkey, Ana’s husband reported to the police that someone had broken into his car and stolen his motorcycle clothes and helmet.

The man who sprayed black paint on the surveillance cameras at 9:30 p.m. on Friday, February 2, was wearing a motorcycle helmet that hid his face.

When he got inside the gate, he put tape over the lock so the door wouldn’t close.

At one point he looked up at the camera, which he had sprayed with paint, but the lens was not completely destroyed and the investigators could determine that the man resembled Ana’s husband.

Spanish police managed to identify which spray paint he used and it turned out that the husband had been caught on film that afternoon in a shop, where he bought just such a can of black spray paint – and two rolls of strong tape, according to NBC News.

Appealed for help

The man is also caught on film when he comes out of the lift in Ana’s house at 10.30pm that evening with what appears to be a suitcase.

As horrible as it sounds – Sanna Rameau believes that Ana was in that suitcase.

– How else could she have disappeared? She has not been seen leaving the house on foot. She has been outed.

Ana Knezevic’s family has, after her husband’s arrest, gone out to the media and appealed for help to find Ana.

Her mother is beside herself with despair and the family is hoping to the last that Ana will still be alive.

Sanna Rameau wishes for nothing more, but she no longer believes in it.

– It would be a dream, but it seems unlikely. If he had kidnapped her and she was still alive, surely he would have said so by now? He doesn’t have that. I’ve been twisting and turning on this, but it seems incredible.

“Traumatic to read”

In recent days, Sanna Rameau has read the FBI’s report, over and over again, to try to understand and take in what it says.

– It is traumatic to read it, she says.

But she can only come to one conclusion:

– I think his plan was to kill her. Unfortunately.

The day after Ana’s disappearance, both Sanna and a Spanish friend received the same message from Ana.

The first stated:

“I have met someone wonderful!! He has a summer house about two hours from Madrid. We are going there now and I will spend a few days there. The reception is bad. I’ll call you when I get back.”

In the second, she told that she had met the man as late as the day before, when she was out for a walk. “A fantastic chemistry,” the message read.

Woman contacted the police

It wasn’t like Ana at all – and Sanna reacted at once.

She wrote right back and wondered what was going on – without getting an answer.

Now it has emerged that on the same day, Ana’s husband asked a Colombian woman he met through a dating app for help translating these very two messages, into perfect Colombian Spanish. Ana was originally from Colombia.

The man said he was helping a friend in Serbia write a play with a Colombian character.

It would never have come to light had the woman not told her mother that she had met a Serbian man online – the mother googled his last name and discovered that the man’s wife had gone missing in Madrid.

When the woman read a news article online, she recognized the messages she had been asked to translate – and contacted the police.

“The world’s weirdest”

Through his lawyer, Ken Padowitz, the husband denies having anything to do with his wife’s disappearance, writes Fox News.

For Sanna Rameau, who during her time in Florida also met Ana’s husband, everything is just surreal and grotesque.

– What happens to a person who does this?

– There is no winner in this.

She can’t hold back the tears when she thinks about her friend.

– She was so dear to me. She was a great friend. She was the world’s rarest and kindest person. I can’t understand it.