Marielle Franco was murdered six years ago and the crime remains unclear.

Six years after Rio de Janeiro councilwoman Mariel Franco and her driver that day, Anderson Gomez, who was covering a friend’s day off, were killed in a hail of gunfire on a street in the Estacio district of this Brazilian city on the night of 14 March 2018, the crimes remain unsolved. Four suspects have already been arrested, including former police sergeant Ronnie Lessa, who carried out the shooting, but two main questions in the investigation remain unanswered: who ordered the death of young left-wing councilor Mariel and why.

Throughout the investigation, several suspects were unofficially named as masterminds, including an adviser, a deputy, an adviser to the Court of Auditors, and even the Bolsonaro family was included in this list. But nothing could be proven against anyone, and numerous attempts to obstruct the investigation were proven, carried out even by high-ranking Rio de Janeiro police officers who were removed from the case and their positions due to these improper interventions.

At the beginning of this year, the director of the Federal Police, Andrei Rodriguez, promised that the corporation he commands, which has been running the case in parallel with the Rio state police, will, by the end of this first semester, present leaders who are already halfway there. This Thursday, the new Minister of Justice and Public Security, former Federal Supreme Court judge Ricardo Lewandowski, also announced that final answers to the still open questions about the murders of Mariel and Anderson will soon be received.

In particular, there is a detailed confession by Lessa, made in cooperation with the justice system late last year in exchange for possible legal benefits after five years in prison, but until now the High Court, STJ, to which this Denunciation was sent for approval or not, has yet to nothing has been decided. The fact that the case was referred to the STJ, which tries state governors and members of the Court of Auditors, seems to confirm Lessa’s leaked testimony, which allegedly implicated a member of that court as a principal but a former police officer. said that there were two principals, and nothing was known about the other.

The reasons for the brutal crimes have already given rise to many theories, including that Mariel planned to allocate for social housing a huge area in the western zone of the city, which until now was dominated by armed militia, who intended to build a series of buildings for residential condominiums and countless millions in profit. What is certain is that the death of the council member, elected to her first term in 2016 and the fifth-highest vote-getter in Rio de Janeiro, had been planned for a long time, so much so that the first attempt to assassinate her was made by the same group a year ago, before her death in 2017, but failed due to the fact that the driver of the criminals’ car made an incorrect maneuver, it became known after the death of the politician.

In addition to Ronnie Lessa, the veteran marksman who fired the nine-shot burst that killed Mariel and Anderson, former police sergeant Elcio Queiroz, who drove the Cobalt car from which the shots were fired, and former fire department sergeant Maxwell Simões, who hid the weapon used in crimes, and Edilson Barbosa, arrested last February, owner of a scrap metal yard and accused of dismantling a car after a double murder to hamper the investigation. With Ronnie Lessa in the back seat and Elcio Queiroz at the wheel, the Cobalt followed Mariel Franco in the last hours of her life, followed her closely at several political events and even when she went to a bar to meet friends, his last meeting before heading home after 9 pm local time, and on a dark street in Estacio, the driver parked his car next to the one the adviser and her driver were following, and one explosion ended both his lives.