The leader of the Juventude Leonina claque, Nuno Mendes (Mustafá), handed himself in today at the Sintra Prison to serve the six-year and four-month sentence he was sentenced to in 2019 in a case involving burglaries.
The information was provided to the Lusa agency by a judicial source, adding that “the defendant gave himself up voluntarily” at Sintra jail, accompanied by his lawyer Rocha Quintal.
After the Cascais court ruling on December 6, 2019, Mustafá and the other convicted defendants filed appeals, which were always rejected by the higher courts, and the decision became final.
There had been an arrest warrant for Nuno Mendes since November 2023.
In this case, the Cascais court also sentenced former Judicial Police inspector Paulo Pereira Cristóvão to seven and a half years in prison. He also handed himself in voluntarily at the beginning of the month to Évora jail to serve his sentence.
The trial included 14 other defendants (including three PSP officers), 12 of whom were sentenced to between four and a half and 17 years in prison.
One of the officers, Elói Fachada, was sentenced to 16 years in prison, another, Luís Conceição, to 17 years, and a PSP officer, Telma Freitas, was given a suspended sentence of three years and five months.
Pereira Cristóvão and Mustafá were sentenced for their involvement in and preparation of the robberies of a residence in Atrium Cascais on February 27, 2014, and another on Avenida do Brasil, in Lisbon, in April of that year, from which no money was taken.
As for the robbery of the residence in Cascais Atrium, the panel of judges proved “practically all the facts” set out in the prosecution’s indictment, namely the “effective” participation of Paulo Pereira Cristóvão. It was also proven that one of the PSP officers who entered the house threatened and pointed service weapons at the victims.
For the Cascais court, it was proven that the defendants took 145,000 euros from a safe that the owner had at home, despite the fact that the defendants, who received between 7,500 and 10,000 euros each, said at the trial that they took 80,000 euros from the robbery.
As for the remaining 65,000 euros, the president of the panel of judges said, when reading the judgment, “that the whereabouts” of this amount were unknown.
The second robbery, in April 2014, was at a house in Lisbon belonging to an alleged BPN bank fraudster who owed the defendant Celso Augusto money and kept it under the floorboards, but the robbers linked to ‘Mustafá’ didn’t find any money.
