António Pedro Santos / Lusa
Two PSP agents who accompanied the agent who allegedly shot Odair Moniz in October last year were accused of false testimony about the knife that appeared at the scene.
As the newspaper reported in this Wednesday’s edition, the police officer who accompanied the officer accused of murder was only a witness in the main case.
However, in an order indicting another case, dated October 1, the Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP) decided to charge this officer and another from the same police with false testimony.
At issue is the version presented to the authorities by the two agents about where they found the knife that was used “as justification for [o colega] resort to the firearm” that killed Odair.
As Público quotes, “this process aimed to investigate two sets of facts: on the one hand, whether the agents involved in the events actually wrote the respective official report, the so-called news report: on the other, whether the dagger had been planted by someone at the scene of the crime – or, at least, moved – and placed in plain view after the death” by Odair Moniz.
Evidence reinforces two possibilities
According to the indictment cited by the morning newspaper, all the evidence reinforces the suspicion that or the dagger “was placed in the place (in the event that it does not belong to Odair) or placed in plain sight (if it belongs to you)”.
However, the MP concluded, based on the images captured and the testimonies collected, that the two agents allegedly lied when they claimed they saw the knife under Odair Moniz’s body when they went to lift him.
They will have intended to protect their colleague
“The prosecutor now reiterated that the narrative of the news report is constructed in such a way as to lead to the interpretation that the agent acted in self-defense because Odair Moniz wielded a knife”, writes the newspaper.
According to the MP, “none of the statements correspond to the truth: the dagger or knife they referred to was not under Odair’s body”.
Contradicted by another colleague
The MP indicates that in addition to these three defendants, another agentalso present on site, denied seeing any dagger under the corpse and a doctor said that she only saw the bladed weapon after the body had been taken from the scene.
In January, the Lusa agency had reported that the MP found no evidence that Odair Moniz, killed by a PSP agent, used a knife to threaten the two agents, in the early hours of October 21, 2024, in Cova da Moura, Amadora.
According to the accusation to which Lusa had access, Odair Moniz tried to escape from the PSP and resist arrest, but the Public Prosecutor’s Office never describes any threat using a bladed weapon.
released by the PSP on the day of Odair Moniz’s death, which indicated that Odair “resisted arrest” and tried to attack the agents “using a bladed weapon”.
The order only states that a dagger 25 centimeters long, with a 15 centimeter blade and a plastic handle was found “in the immediate vicinity” of the place where Odair fell, near the car that was parked there. This dagger “did not have enough biological traces to obtain a DNA profile”the document reads.
The MP’s accusation, to which the Lusa agency has now had access, says that “during the investigation carried out, the suspicion arose that the news report prepared by the Public Security Police (PSP) suffers from inconsistencies and inaccuracies”.
In January, the MP ordered the extraction of a certificate from the process for an independent investigation into the alleged falsification of the PSP news report.
Odair Moniz, 43, died in Cova da Moura, victim of two gunshots fired by the PSP agent on October 21, 2024.
The trial of the PSP agent suspected of the murder was scheduled for Wednesday, but was moved to October 22nd due to the lawyer’s health reasons.
