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Mónica Silva became known as Murtosa’s pregnant woman after disappearing on October 3, 2023.
Court of Justice confirms acquittal of the suspect: there is no evidence to convict him. Mônica Silva went out for coffee almost three years ago and never came back. The death of Murtosa’s pregnant woman has also not been proven.
The Porto Court of Appeal confirmed the acquittal of Fernando Valente, defendant in the case of disappearance of Mônica Silvaknown as “the pregnant Murtosa”, who has been missing since October 2023. The decision fully maintains the ruling of the Aveiro Jury Court, which had already acquitted the businessman of all the crimes of which he was accused.
In a statement released this Thursday morning, cited by , the Porto Court of Justice revealed that the appeals presented by the Public Ministry and Mónica Silva’s family were dismissed.
Fernando Valente was accused of the crimes of qualified homicide, abortion, desecration of a corpse, illegitimate access and counterfeit currency.
According to the judges, the first instance decision did not suffer from “any nullity”, nor did it present “substantial internal defects or errors of judgment”.
The court considered that the Aveiro ruling resulted from a “considered, global and combined” assessment of the evidence gathered in the process.
The Report also highlights that several of the indications contained in the Public Prosecutor’s accusation were not demonstrated or ended up losing strength in the face of other evidence. Therefore, he concluded that there was not enough evidentiary security to attribute to Fernando Valente the commission of the crimes of which he was accused.
The decision thus confirms the understanding of the Aveiro Jury Court, which in July last year had considered that the accusation did not present “any irrefutable evidence”. At the time, the three judges and four jurors understood that the defendant’s motivation for the alleged crime had not been proven, nor had the attribution of paternity, the route to the place of death, the location of the events or the carrying out of deep cleaning to hide traces been proven.
The court of first instance proved that Mônica Silva was alive on the night of October 3, 2023. That day, at 11:19 pm, the woman had a telephone conversation, via Messenger, with her youngest son, who did not detect any signs of embarrassment.
One of the central points of the acquittal was the lack of proof of Mônica Silva’s death. The court considered that there was no reliable evidence from the records to verify the death event, nor was any biological trace found that would allow us to conclude that the woman had been the victim of an attempt on her life.
In practice, the Public Ministry intended to prove that Fernando Valente had killed Mônica Silva, but the Court was faced with the absence of the victim’s body and the impossibility of determining the manner, means or place of an eventual death.
