The brutal murder of Rio de Janeiro council member Mariel Franco, who was executed by multiple shots in her car on March 14, 2018 on the streets of this Brazilian city, ends on Tuesday for five years without explanation. Two suspects, former police officers Ronnie Lessa and Elsio Queiroz, have been in prison for four years on charges of involvement in the execution, but to this day it has not been possible to establish either the customer, or the customers, or the motive for the crime. crime.
Mariel, a brash 37-year-old councilor elected by PSOL, the Party of Socialism and Freedom, was killed shortly after 9:30 pm when a car driven by driver Anderson Gomes, who also died, drove into a dark street in the Estacio neighborhood. , in the central region of the river. According to the investigation, another car, driven by Elcio, followed Mariel’s car for several hours, and in what he thought was the ideal location, Ronnie held a powerful automatic pistol, fitted with equipment that turns it into a kind of machine gun, and fired several shots. . once. .
Initially, another adviser, allegedly linked to armed militias in Rio de Janeiro and now close to Lula da Silva’s government, was considered the prime suspect of being the mastermind and was arrested, but nothing was proven against him. Subsequently, the family of then-president Jair Bolsonaro, especially one of his sons, Carlos Bolsonaro, were also on the list of suspects, both because Carlos, also an adviser, had a big falling out with Mariel, and because the alleged killer Ronnie Lessa lived in the same condominium , as Bolsonaro, but also failed to prove anything.
Facing successive accusations of defending suspects and obstructing an investigation, in those five years, five delegates (inspectors) of the Rio de Janeiro police were acquitted in the case, and with each acquittal, the investigation changed course and almost everything started from scratch. The unrest in the State Ministry was also great, and the prosecutors in this case were also fired or resigned, most recently collectively.
The new Minister of Justice, Flavio Dino, who took office in January along with the new government, gave hope that the investigation would move forward and ordered the Federal Police, which he controls, to launch their own investigation into the crime. But even now, five years after the brutal murders, the question still remains, who killed Mariel?
Author: Domingos Grilo Serrinha This Correspondent in Brazil
Source: CM Jornal
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