The Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP) today asked for a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison for the two alleged murderers of an elderly German couple in a village in the municipality of Beja, one of the lawyers in the case revealed.
The two defendants, a 54-year-old man and a 38-year-old woman, are in pre-trial detention and began their trial this morning at Beja District Court, having been convicted of two counts of aggravated homicide and one of aggravated theft.
In the closing arguments, which took place this afternoon, the public prosecutor asked for the conviction of the two defendants, as well as the maximum sentence of 25 years in prison for both, the defendant’s lawyer, André Caetano, told Lusa.
The panel of judges trying the case has announced that the judgment will be handed down on April 3 at 2pm, also at the court in the Alentejo town, said the same lawyer.
During the morning, at the start of the trial, the defendant denied committing the crimes, but did not rule out the possibility that the other accused had done so.
“I didn’t kill them [the two elderly Germans]. I don’t know if Fernando [the other defendant] did it, but I don’t put my hands in the fire for anyone,” he said.
The defendant, her partner, who was convicted of the same crimes, chose not to speak in court.
The defendant reported that on April 16, 2023, the day the murders took place, after dinner, the defendant was alone in the house with the elderly woman and then asked the woman to call the elderly man.
“I don’t know what happened in there. I didn’t hear anything,” he claimed.
Shortly afterwards, he continued, the accused left the house with a bag containing the belongings of the three, including a lamp, walked away and ended up calling a cab which took them to Beja, where they stayed overnight in a hostel.
Pointing out that she never returned to the German couple’s farm, the woman again refused to guarantee that the defendant didn’t do it [commit the crimes], because the next day she reported that the man was absent from the boarding house where they were staying for an hour and a half.
When questioned by the judges, the defendant acknowledged that in Aljustrel, where they had moved to in the meantime, she drove with the defendant in the victims’ car and saw him using the German couple’s bank card.
“Fernando told me that they had given him the car because they owed them money,” he explained, giving the same answer when asked about the bank card.
As for the sale of the car for 200 euros, the woman pointed out that it was the defendant who made the deal.
One of the judges also confronted the defendant with alleged contradictions between her testimony and that of her mother, namely in relation to her presence inside the house at the time of the murders, but the woman maintained her version.
The elderly were murdered on April 16, 2023 on the German couple’s farm in Baleizão, Beja, but the bodies were only found by the authorities almost a month later, on May 11, following an alert from their son, who lives in Germany.
According to the indictment, the defendants took advantage of the fact that the 71-year-old woman was alone and “hit her several times with an iron bar”. Afterwards, the defendant went to call the elderly man, who was in an outbuilding, and when he entered the house they hit him with “several blows, using an iron bar, to the head, torso and limbs”.