Two Lisbon police officers have been accused of torturing and raping people, filming their alleged abuse and sharing the videos with other cops in a WhatsApp group.
The two officers, aged 21 and 24, are being investigated by the Department of Investigation and Criminal Action of Lisbon following their arrest on July 10 last year.
In an indictment filed in court by the Public Prosecutor’s Office on January 9, it was stated that the two officers abused detainees with ‘punches, slaps, and blows to the head with their gun butts, even filming and photographing some of these situations and the respective victims’.
They allegedly targeted drug addicts and petty criminals, many of whom were foreign nationals or homeless.
In one particularly shocking instance, one of the defendants allegedly used a baton to rape and beat a man, before abandoning him in the street.
The indictment additionally reads: ‘The use of a baton… was reported in another situation, where a broom handle was also used.’
In another case, a detained man allegedly had a gun pointed at his head and was subjected to ‘slaps to the face, punches to the head, and blows to the body’ by the two officers.
Upon finding a knife on the man, one of the cops ‘cut off some of his dreadlocks and threw them into a trash can’ as the other officer filmed everything on his phone.
Two Lisbon police officers have been accused of torturing and raping people, filming their alleged abuse and sharing the videos with other cops in a WhatsApp group (File image of Lisbon police)
‘Everything was filmed and often shared in WhatsApp groups with dozens of other police officers’, the indictment read.
Prosecutors have said that the alleged crimes were committed by the two cops, who were early in their careers, over a short period of time.
They said that this demonstrated ‘a repeated, cold and deliberate behavioural posture, marked by a lack of empathy and the conscious instrumentation of their position of authority’.
One of the cops has been handed 29 charges, while the other has been charged wit six crimes.
Several more people were identified as alleged co-perpetrators, but were not formally charged by police.