A drug dealer who is serving life in prison for murdering a mother and her young son over a £400 debt has been charged with the brutal murder of a British man in Portugal.
Jacob Barnard and his enforcer Andrew Milne were jailed for a total of 70 years at Brighton Crown Court in May 2021 for setting fire to the home of Gina Ingles, 34, her four-year-old son Milo and partner Toby Jarrett.
The 33-year-old is now facing extradition to stand trial for the murder of British ex-pat Joel Eldridge.
The 29-year-old from Bexhill, disappeared around six months after moving to Portugal to join a building project in 2018.
His remains were found more than a year later, hidden in woodland near the town of Pedrogao Grande following a public appeal from his family and detectives from the Surrey and Sussex major crime team.
State prosecutors in the city of Castelo Branco have now charged convicted murderer Barnard and an alleged accomplice who has been named as 30-year-old Joshua Liam Sherwood with murder and desecrating a body.
A 20-page indictment prepared by the Portuguese Policia Judiciaria force accuses Barnard of hitting his alleged victim's head with an axe after attacking him with a stun gun and stabbing and shooting him.
And it claims Mr Eldridge was killed in a brutal execution his alleged killers had pre-planned because they feared he was about to return to the UK and report them to police for crimes being committed abroad.
Prosecutors say Barnard only stopped when he was “tired and convinced he was dead, as was his intention”.
The traumatic head injuries Joel suffered as a result of the axe attack were the “direct cause” of his death.
Barnard, born in Aberystwyth, had already been jailed for eight years in Portugal before his UK murder trial for drug trafficking and possession of an offensive weapon.
Police seized a 500,000-volt Scorpy Max stun gun, a machete-type knife and a gun said to have been used in Mr Eldridge's murder before his remains were found.
The Portuguese prosecution indictment says the slain Brit was dumped in a nearby grave on shrubland “dug by the suspects days earlier”.
Although Sherwood, whose whereabouts is currently unknown, is not accused of physically attacking Mr Eldridge, prosecutors claim he and Barnard had “mutually agreed” to kill their alleged victim.
The indictment said: “They showed themselves to be insensitive to the value of human life, knowing their conduct was especially perverse and censurable as it was designed to cover up their practice of drug trafficking.”
A date for the pair's trial by three professional judges has not yet been set. They are expected to face prison sentences of around 25 years if convicted of the two crimes they have been indicted on.
Mr Eldridge's last contact with his family was in mid-July 2018 after he wished his brother a happy birthday on Facebook. He had travelled to Portugal in January that year to work on a house near the university city of Coimbra.
His disappearance was reported to Sussex Police in late August 2018 and a public and media appeal was issued at the end of that month.
His Bexhill-based parents Jacki and Alan made a video appeal around the time of what would have been his 30th birthday in March 2019, saying: 'We know someone knows something.
“Please if you know anything, if you have heard any rumours about where Joel might be, if you have seen Joel, who was the last person to see him...please get in touch with Sussex Police and tell them what you know.”
The blaze that killed Gina Ingles and her son was started in the dead of night after petrol poured through the front door was ignited at their home in Eastbourne, on July 10, 2018.
Barnard and Milne, 42, were each found guilty of two counts of murder and one of attempted murder following a trial.
Barnard was jailed for life with a minimum term of 36 years. Furniture remover Milne, from Hastings, was jailed for life with a minimum term of 34 years.
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