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Brazil ex-lawmaker gets 50 years for husband’s murder

Photo: Michel Jesus / AFP

| By AFP |

Former Brazilian congresswoman Flordelis dos Santos was sentenced Sunday to 50 years in prison for the murder of her husband in 2019, a Rio de Janeiro court ruled.

Famous for adopting dozens of street children from Rio de Janeiro’s slums, Dos Santos, 61, and her husband, pastor Anderson do Carmo, were a power couple in Brazil’s burgeoning Evangelical Christian movement until he died in a hail of bullets at their home in a Rio suburb in June 2019.

Prosecutors charged Dos Santos in August 2020 with “orchestrating the homicide, enlisting (several of her grown children) to take part in the crime and attempting to disguise it as an armed robbery.”

Prosecutors said the suspected motive was to gain power over the couple’s finances, which Do Carmo, then 42, managed with “rigorous control.”

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Dos Santos had been protected by parliamentary immunity but she lost it after being ousted by a near-unanimous vote of her colleagues in August 2021.

The former congresswoman was also found guilty of trying to murder her husband with poison on at least six previous occasions, as well as forgery of documents and armed criminal association, according to the Public Prosecutor’s Office complaint.

Dos Santos was elected to Congress for the conservative Social Democratic Party in 2018.

Born in the Rio favela, or slum, of Jacarezinho, she met Do Carmo in 1994.

Together, they founded what they called the Community of the Evangelical Ministry Flordelis.

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Five of the couple’s other children and a granddaughter were also accused in the trial.

Simone dos Santos Rodrigues, biological daughter of the former congresswoman, was also sentenced on Sunday to 31 years in prison, while four adopted children and a granddaughter were acquitted.

One of Dos Santos’s biological sons, accused of being the gunman, as well as another family member who bought the weapon, were sentenced a year ago.

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International

Austrian man arrested in Croatia with deceased woman as passenger in his car

A 65-year-old Austrian citizen was arrested at a border checkpoint in Croatia after attempting to enter the country in his car with a deceased woman sitting as a passenger, police announced on Tuesday.

The man was detained in a routine check in late November in Gunja, a border area separating Bosnia from Croatia, the police told AFP. Suspicious because they saw “no consciousness or movement” from the passenger, Croatian officers called a doctor, who confirmed the death of the 83-year-old woman, also Austrian, according to her identification.

The woman’s relationship to the suspect is unknown. She had died in Bosnia, and the man intended to repatriate her body to Austria to “avoid the formalities related to transporting a corpse,” according to the police. Croatian media reported that the man was her legal guardian.

Once her death was confirmed, a funeral service took charge of the body.

 

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International

Colombian nationals arrested for human trafficking and disappearance of migrant boat

 

Colombian authorities arrested two nationals accused of the illegal trafficking of migrants to the United States and of endangering lives due to the disappearance of a boat with 40 people aboard, U.S. Department of Justice officials reported on Tuesday.

Hernando Manuel de la Cruz Rivera Orjuela, 52, and Luis Enrique Linero Pinto, 40, both Colombian citizens, were arrested on December 13 in Colombia at the request of the United States for their alleged involvement in a “transnational human trafficking operation,” the department said in a statement.

According to the charges, the detainees were transporting migrants to San Andrés Island in the Caribbean, where they would then be taken by boat to Nicaragua. The goal was to reach the United States through Central America and Mexico.

The accused are said to have advised the migrants on how to reach San Andrés Island, where they personally received them, arranged accommodations, and “took them to the boats that transported them to Nicaragua so they could enter the United States illegally,” the statement reads.

“These defendants put several migrants on the boat that disappeared off the coast of Nicaragua in 2023,” said Deputy Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri, head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, as cited in the statement.

Both men are “directly and personally responsible for the illicit trafficking of migrants on that vessel,” according to the indictment dated October 23.

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International

Homemade landmine explosion in Michoacán kills two soldiers, injures five

Two soldiers were killed and five others were injured by the explosion of homemade landmines planted by a criminal group in a mountainous area of the Mexican state of Michoacán (west), the Secretary of Defense reported on Tuesday.

The attack occurred on Monday morning in the municipality of Cotija, a border area between Michoacán and the state of Jalisco, when the military was conducting a reconnaissance mission after receiving information about an armed camp in the area, explained Secretary General Ricardo Trevilla.

“At that moment, an improvised explosive device detonated. Unfortunately, two soldiers lost their lives, and five others were injured,” the military leader detailed. The affected soldiers were airlifted to hospitals in the region by a military helicopter, while the rest of the team continued with the reconnaissance of the area.

Trevilla stated that before the explosion, the military unit had located the dismembered bodies of three people, and upon continuing the mission, they confirmed the camp was abandoned.

Asked about the individuals responsible for placing the explosives, the general suggested they could be criminals linked to the local group Cárteles Unidos, which operates in Michoacán and uses these tactics in their territorial dispute with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the country.

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