After an initial interaction, one of the EMEL employees took a more aggressive approach and allegedly “hit the car”.
The man beaten by three EMEL employees in Lisbon’s Avenida da República spoke to CMTV on Thursday, explaining everything that happened the afternoon he was attacked. Hélder, who has already been discharged from hospital, lost his memory at times and was helped by the public.
On May 29, the man was waiting for his wife to go to lunch, when he noticed an individual on a motorcycle telling him “not to stop there”. “I didn’t call,” he says.
After the initial interaction, the EMEL employee takes a more aggressive approach and delivers what will have been “a blow to the car”. “I don’t know if it was a punch, an elbow or a kick,” he reports.
Helder hears again that he has to move the car, but retorts that he can’t do so because the place in front of him is forbidden. After several requests to move the car, the official threatens the driver with a fine. The victim does not change his position and remains in the same spot.
According to the assaulted man’s version, the EMEL employee is standing in front of the car, ready to fine him. Helder insists again that “it’s a matter of seconds”, before a van from the municipal company appears, with two other employees.
One of them allegedly “aggressively” leaned his head against Helder before telling him: “Get your car out of here. Can’t you hear my colleague?”, says the victim. Helder pushes the man away and tells him that this conversation does not concern him. The EMEL employee again adopts an aggressive attitude and asks, “ironically”: “Are you going to hit me?”.
This question triggered the aggressiveness of the three EMEL employees. “I was punched and fell to the ground. I started getting beaten up by the three of them,” he recounts.
The beating left him with a broken tooth, two shaking teeth, a fractured nasal sceptre and “scraped knees from trying to escape”. “I went to the other side of the road, where I fell. People said I fainted twice, but I don’t even remember,” he says.
Helder insists that the assaults only stopped thanks to the intervention of “witnesses”. The victim hopes that EMEL employees will be punished so that such a situation does not recur.
The man, who is on sick leave, had an interview with the municipal company where he explained the facts. Hélder filed a complaint the day after the incident and underwent surgery at São José Hospital on June 4.
