Marielle Case: Flávio Dino offers support to the Federal Police

Last week, the Minister of Justice, Flávio Dino, called the governor of Rio de Janeiro, Cláudio Castro, and offered the support of the Federal Police in the investigation of the murder of the congressman Marielle Franco, and the driver Anderson Gomes, a crime that will complete five years old on March 14th.

Castro accepted, and recalled that Marielle was his colleague in the Chamber of Councillors, and that this crime cannot go unpunished. “I’ve always had a very respectful relationship with Councilwoman Marielle Franco. Marielle and I were councilors in the same legislature in Rio City Council. We have always had a very respectful relationship, even with divergences of ideas, as happens in debates in legislative houses. I have always advocated that the response to her murder needs to be given to the family and society,” he said.

In response, Cláudio Castro replied that “the murderers of councilor Marielle Franco and driver Anderson Gomes were arrested thanks to a complex investigation, carried out with extreme expertise and technique by the Civil Police of Rio. The investigation is still ongoing at the Capital Homicide Police Station.”

The two arranged a meeting in Rio, where Castro is expected to present to the minister a plan for the state’s security forces to combat the militias, after the governor returns from a trip to New York with the aim of attracting investment to the state.

By agreeing to the help of the PF, it will not be necessary to request a federalization of the murder of the councilor, because the investigation continues with the state police and prosecutors.

It is not the first time that the PF acts in the Marielle case. One of the institution’s first contributions was the analysis of nine cases of bullets collected at the crime scene. In only one of them was part of a fingerprint that, despite being compared with those stored in police databases, it was not possible to identify who it belonged to.

In the report prepared by the federal experts, they also recorded that the packaging of the material was not adequate, since the bullets were in the same bag, which allowed friction between them and, consequently, the loss of traces. Marielle, her parliamentary advisor Fernanda Chaves and the driver Anderson were ambushed on the night of March 14, 2018, in the Estácio neighborhood. Only Fernanda survived.

In other interventions by the PF, one of the highlights was the investigation of a farce engendered by a military police officer, in April 2018, which led to an investigation of obstruction of the criminal investigation. PM Rodrigo Jorge Ferreira, known as Ferreirinha, came forward as a witness and accused his former ally, militiaman Orlando Oliveira de Araújo, Orlando Curicica, and then councilor Marcello Siciliano of plotting to murder Marielle.

For seven months, the Homicide Police Station of the Capital kept this investigation line as the main one in the case. But the PF, in the inquiry dubbed the “investigation of the investigation”, discovered that Ferreirinha created a story to dominate the territory of Curicica.

By affirming the involvement of the former accomplice in the murder, the PM succeeded in his intention: the transfer of the militiaman to the federal penitentiary of Mossoró, in Rio Grande do Norte. Curicica and Siciliano always denied the crime, which was confirmed during the investigation. The more than 200-page report was signed by Federal Police chief Leandro Almada, appointed this week as PF superintendent in Rio.

In October 2018, with the plot unraveled, the police station and the Special Action Group to Combat Organized Crime (Gaeco) identified retired PM sergeant Ronnie Lessa as the author of the shots at Marielle and Anderson, and former PM Élcio de Queiroz , the driver of the car used in the crime. The two have been imprisoned since March 2019, in federal prisons outside Rio.

At that time, the PF also ceded three agents to Gaeco, who participated in the surveys of Operations Intocáveis ​​1, 2 and 3, which culminated in the arrest of militiamen from Rio das Pedras and Muzema, in addition to identifying the former captain of Bope Adriano Mendonça da Nóbrega, killed in February 2020, in Bahia, as head of the “Office of Crime”, a group of hired killers.

Four months before Marielle’s murder, on November 1, 2017, Governor Cláudio Castro (PSC) invited the parliamentarian to a public hearing on entrepreneurship in women’s lives. The councilwoman not only accepted the invitation, but also honored her colleague’s event with a speech about female “empowerment”.

*With information from Extra

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