MAI robber sentenced to 5 years in prison
The man who robbed the general secretariat of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was sentenced this Friday to five years and three months in prison for two crimes of theft. The decision comes after, last week, the criminal confessed “without reservations to all the facts of the accusation” , as recalled by the judge.
The Public Prosecutor's Office requested a conviction for two crimes of qualified theft, for the assault on the SG of the MAI, as well as for another previous theft in a Local Accommodation. With regard to the assault on the MAI, the court decided to convict the man for the crime of qualified theft in the completed form, but convicted him for the crime of qualified theft in the attempted form for the other assault that was being tried, as it understood that the man did not keep the stolen goods.
In the session in which he fully confessed to the facts described in the accusation, the man also admitted that he was not aware that the building belonged to the Portuguese Republic, admitting that if he had known, he would not have gone ahead with the robbery.
After climbing up to a window in the building via scaffolding, the man broke the glass and entered a meeting room, from where he stole ten laptops — one of them belonging to the then Secretary-General of Internal Administration, Marcelo Mendonça de Carvalho, and another to the Deputy Secretary-General of Internal Administration, Teresa Costa.
In possession of the devices, the defendant went to Largo de São Domingos, in the parish of Arroios, where he sold the stolen goods.
Unlike these items, the microwave and other household items that he managed to steal in the other robbery mentioned in this trial did not remain in his possession. This time, when he was leaving the house that had been robbed, he was intercepted by a neighbor and ended up fleeing without taking the stolen goods with him.
The convicted man, born in Covilhã, had been living in Portugal since February last year, when he returned from France, where he had emigrated at the age of 18. After several years working in maintenance, he was convicted in that country before coming to Lisbon. In the first session of the trial, the man said that he used cocaine and lived on the streets, admitting that he carried out the thefts to have money to buy drugs.
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