// Paulo Abreu dos Santos / LinkedIn; Mário Cruz / Lusa
Paulo Abreu dos Santos, former deputy to former Minister of Justice Catarina Sarmento e Castro
Paulo Abreu dos Santos, former deputy to former Minister of Justice Catarina Sarmento, was accused by the Public Ministry of committing 7,986 sexual crimes related to minors. The majority of identified victims have foreign nationality.
According to the prosecution, at issue are 7.095 crimes of possession and sharing of images and videos of child sexual abuse, as well as 889 related to images captured by the accused himself of a 10-year-old boy, whom he met at a religious temple. The case also includes two crimes of sexual abuse allegedly committed against the same child in that worship space.
According to the indictment order, to which she had access, the accused, who served in the government between 2022 and 2024, would have started in 2021 to use various social media platforms to access content that sexually exploited minors.
The authorities identified their participation in 13 chat groups online, some with designations like “kids boys only” or “boys videos”, where it will have been flagged by North American authorities in 2024.
The investigation began that same year, following an alert sent by US authorities, which detected the lawyer’s activity on channels sharing pedophile content. In mid-December, a house search operation culminated in his arrest in the act of committing a crime.
At the time, he was in possession of more than eight thousand files of pornography of minors.
Since January this year, Paulo Abreu dos Santos has been represented by lawyer Manuel Teixeira. Initially, its defense was in charge of Marco Antão, who resigned his mandate citing conscientious objection.
The resignation was presented to the court in the week before the Christmas 2025 judicial vacation period. Subsequently, a public defender was appointed, who also ended up resigning from representing the accused.
Paulo Abreu dos Santos has been in preventive detention since December 13, 2025. He has now been accused by the prosecutor Felismina Carvalho Franco of almost eight thousand crimes, with the trial expected to take place by the end of this year.
