Abdul Latif Sharif was an Egyptian chemist who became known as ‘The Jackal of Ciudad Juárez’. But was he a killer or a convenient scapegoat?
Childhood of Abdul Latif Sharif
Abdul Latif Sharif was born into a Muslim family in Egypt as an only child. Growing up he suffered constant sexual abuse from his father and several male relatives. At the age of 12, at his father’s behest, Sharif agreed to marry to his 10-year-old cousin. However, three years later Sharif abandoned that promise of marriage and instead traveled to the United States of America. His family disapproved and his aunt allegedly cast a black magic spell upon him.
While in Egypt, Abdul Sharif studied chemical engineering at Cairo University, where he achieved an average of 9.9. Working as a high school and university instructor, he spent some time in the Soviet Union before traveling to New York to find work in cosmetics, paint, and skin-care companies. He was considered to be professional, attractive, and successful. Women became his obsession during his 21-year stay in the United States. He married twice and had five other partners with whom he lived for long periods of time.
Life in America
Sharif emigrated legally to the United States in 1970, arriving in New York, where he began a job at which he remained employed eight years until being fired in 1978 because of his alcohol problems. He then moved to Pennsylvania, where he resided for three years. In 1981 he moved to Florida, where he was employed in the company Cercoa, Inc. It was during this time, that he committed his first sexual assaults. He married in 1982, but found himself quickly divorced due to the violence he spent on his young wife.
The Crimes of Abdul Sharif
According to official accounts, Abdul Sharif was a promiscuous alcoholic and pedophile. He allegedly tortured dying animals during his hunting expeditions and collected girls’ clothes. According to other sources, this characterization of Sharif was an invention of the prosecution to make credible accusations against him.
Sharif’s first alleged sexual assault took place on 2 May 1981 in North Palm Beach, Florida, where he tricked a woman by promising her a job as a housekeeper. He kidnapped the woman, beat her and sexually assaulted her. Afterwards he let her go.
Abdul Latif Sharif’s defense in the case was provided by Cercoa, Inc. Though Sharif argued that the sex was consensual, he was convicted on charges of assault, rape, and illegal deprivation of liberty, and was released on parole.
Almost immediately after leaving prison, in August of 1981, Abdul assaulted another woman. On this occasion he was sentenced to 45 days in prison after a defense was once again financed by Cercoa, Inc., who strangely enough did not dismiss him from his position until 1982, foot the bill.
In 1982, after his dismissal, he moved to Gainesville, Florida, where he married again. This wife, like the first, soon divorced him after he had beaten her to unconsciousness. On March 17, 1983, Sharif’s third rape was reported. He used the deception of a job as a housekeeper, luring a woman to his house. He hit, raped and threatened her with death, but she managed to escape and report him. This time, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison, in 1984.
A New Beginning
After spending only five years of his 12 year sentence in prison, Abdul Latif Sharif was released in 1989, but he was not deported to Egypt even though the judge had ruled that this would be the case. That year he moved to Midland, Texas, where he was hired by the transnational company Benchmark Research and Technology.
In 1991, Abdul was arrested for drunk driving but again he was not deported.
In 1993, he allegedly raped a woman again and, this time, his defense was sponsored by Benchmark Research and Technology. He was released on parole with the promise that he would never set foot on American soil again.
On May 14, 1994, Sharif moved to Ciudad Juárez, still technically working as a Benchmark employee.
Murders in Mexico
Upon his arrival in Mexico in 1994, Sharif settled in the luxurious and exclusive Rinconadas de San Marcos neighborhood of Ciudad Juárez, with all the expenses sponsored by the company he worked for. Sharif, distinguished himself as an intelligent man, patenting 25 chemical formulas. It was here that his prolific career as an alleged serial killer lasted from 1994 to 1995.
Abdul Sharif’s first alleged murder occurred in Mexico in March of 1995. There were indications that he was a scapegoat of the Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office, who made him into a serial killer. It was claimed that he could have begun killing from 1978 to 1981 while still residing in Pennsylvania, when the unsolved disappearances of several women and girls occurred. However, Sharif was never connected to these events.
Serial Killer
On October 3, 1995, Sharif was reported by a prostitute, 19-year-old Blanca Estela Díaz, as having kidnapped her for three days, during which she was beaten, raped, and threatened with death. The charges were dismissed on the grounds that, contrary to her claims, there were no signs of sexual abuse. However, the Chihuahua government was being pressured to find the perpetrator of the Ciudad Juárez femicides in Lote Bravo and Sharif, with his criminal background, was the ideal candidate to be the serial killer. The Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office sought to establish him as responsible for the multiple homicides.
Within 20 minutes of his release, Sharif was remanded for the disappearance of Elizabeth Castro García, a 17-year-old girl with whom Sharif allegedly had a relationship. Elizabeth’s sister, Eunice, had reported her disappearance on August 15, 1995.
The corpse of a woman who matched Castro’s description was found buried in the desert of Lote Bravo, but the investigation took a turn when it was found that Elizabeth Castro was alive and that the body was that of a woman who disappeared in March of 1995, Silvia Rivera Salas. According to witnesses, Silvia had been kidnapped by two suspects in a van.
Sharif was convicted and sentenced to 60 years in prison for the death of Silvia Rivera Salas. A new criminal proceeding was also opened, accusing him of murdering 17 other women.
While he was in prison, corpses of raped and strangled women continued to appear in different areas of Ciudad Juárez. The authorities sold an image of Sharif to the press portraying him as the psychopathic rapist killer who controlled the murders from prison.
The Scapegoat
Abdul Sharif was known in Ciudad Juárez as a sexual criminal with a long history of assaulting women, and it was not difficult for all to believe that he was responsible for the murders. In addition to the prosecution and the Chihuahuan government, the people believed that one person could be put in place as the sole perpetrator. This claim calmed the families of the murdered and not the national, but the international press that had its sights on Ciudad Juárez.
Abdul Latif Sharif did not speak Spanish, was a foreigner, without family and with a history of sexual assaults. He was exactly what they needed. He was the right person to point to as the killer they wanted to catch.
One day, however, Sharif summoned the media to give a press conference in which he would say the names of the real murderers of the women found dead in Lote Bravo. Under pressure from the press and because of his scarce Spanish, names like and Alejandro and Melchor Máynez came to light.
Alejandro had come to fall in love with a dark, thin and humble girl, and he, as he was known through Juárez, was the adopted son of a prominent Juárez businessman who owned gambling houses, bars and leisure spots on the border with El Paso, Texas. After Alejandro murdered the girl, Sharif claimed to have met him in a bar where he had boasted about raping and murdering girls with the help of his cousin Melchor.
The authorities inquired about that information because he knew that Maynez’s father had paid them off so his son could enjoy total immunity. It indeed had happened, because Alejandro was never questioned or bothered to give his version of the facts regarding what was said by Sharif.
Sharif began to hold constant press conferences, a situation that was deemed inconvenient by the High commanders of the Attorney General’s Office in Chihuahua, so they transferred him to the Chihuahua prison as a highly dangerous prisoner. They denied him the right to see his defense attorney many times with any kind of pretext. Meanwhile, the situation in Juárez worsened, because even with Sharif in jail, bodies of raped and strangled young girls, under the same modus operandi, continued to appear.
Irene Blancas, defense attorney for Sharif, pointed out that he suffered constant threats inside the prison, that the story about him was absurd, and even the same judge who had sentenced him to 60 years in prison, in a personal conversation with the defender of Sharif, admitted to not having enough evidence to convict him. However, the same judge knew that he would not be released, that Sharif would die in prison under strange circumstances, with the authorities later revealing that he had died of a heart attack.
New Femicides
Between October 1995 and April 1996, while Abdul Sharif was already imprisoned, a further 12 femicides were registered in the city. In 1995, a group of serial killers who acted in a group, The Ciudad Juárez Rebels, were arrested and charged with murdering 17 women.
That same year, another serial killer group, The Ruteros of Ciudad Juárez, were arrested. According to the authorities, all of them were hired by Sharif to commit the murders and thus divert the investigations.
In 1996, Abdul Sharif faced 17 charges of aggravated material homicide, 24 counts of intellectual homicide, dozens of charges for kidnapping and rape and charges of organized crime and illegal human trafficking.
His Death
Abdul Latif Sharif died on June 2, 2006, at the age of 59, in the Social Rehabilitation Center of Chihuahua, from a cardiact arrest consistent with a hypovolemic shock generated by a chronic hemorrhage due to peptic ulcer disease. Since 2003, he had been diagnosed with liver cirrhosis subsequent to hepatitis C and alcoholic hepatitis, and a major depressive disorder, at least according to the authorities.
Abdul was buried in Mexico, as no relative could be found to repatriate his remains. His funeral was attended by the Egyptian consul in Mexico, Karim El Sadat. Abdul Latif Sharif claimed he was innocent until his death.
- Born: September 19,1947 (Egypt)
- Death: June 2, 2006 (aged 58)
- Characteristic: Serial Rapist, Serial Killer
- Crime Spree: 1993 –2003
- Number of Victims: 17+
- Location: Mexico
- Method of Murder: kidnapping, extended sexual abuse, torture, strangulation
source: wikipedia | criminalminds.fandom | find a grave
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