Neo-nazis “planned to kill political figures”
Four of the six ‘neo-nazis’ arrested for terrorist activities and incitement to hatred on Tuesday are now in police custody, while two others have been remanded on bail on the understanding that they report regularly to their local police stations.
Today, tabloid Correio da Manhã elaborates on the perceived intentions of the group which appears to have been planning to storm parliament – forcing a form of regime change in Portugal, backed by armed militia.
The paper says that the invasion of parliament was “just one detail of a larger plan by MAL (Movimento Armilar Lusitano)” which involved attacks “with recourse to explosives” against leading political and military figures of the Republic.
“The principal targets, according to an evaluation of messages exchanged (in a private group on the Telegram social network) were Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa (Portugal’s current president), António Costa (former leader of PS Socialists now leading the European Council in Brussels), and admiral Gouveia e Melo (one of candidates for upcoming elections for the country’s next president).
After initial questioning at the central court of criminal instruction in Lisbon yesterday, four of the six ‘founder members’ of the group – Bruno Gonçalves, a PSP agent attached to Lisbon municipal police, Bruno Carrilho, Nuno Pais and Ricardo Pereira were all remanded in custody indicted for terrorism. The remaining suspects, José Carrilho (father of Bruno) and Vítor Marques, were given bail on the basis that the possible charges against them involve ‘detention of prohibited weapon/s’.
According to CM’s report today, in one of the telephone conversations intercepted between Bruno Gonçalves and his sister saw him saying that the possibility of the group carrying out attacks on “important events and high-ranking political figures of European governments” was “on the table”.
Internally, MAL channelled the discourse of hatred towards Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa: “a bullet in the eye would be the least”; António Costa (labelled ‘black’) and Gouveia e Melo, for his coordination of the Covid-19 mass vaccination campaign, for which he was labelled “Jew, grandson of a Jewess and executioner of Portuguese children”.
As for politicians of the left-wing, messages recovered by police show that the group wanted “all of them to be hung by the neck and turned into lightbulbs on telegraph poles”.
As the PJ anti-terrorism unit chief Manuela Santos said at a press release on Tuesday, investigations into this group are continuing, and there could well be further arrests.
Blowing the lid off the long-running police operation, Santos referred to this round-up of extremists as being similar to that which took place in Germany in 2022, and has only recently seen new arrests.
“Disarmament 3D” (so named because of the 3D printers recovered that had been used in the production of weapons) resulted from “the detection online of indicators of extremist demonstrations by apologists of nationalist ideologies and radical and violent far-right movements, followers of an anti-system and conspiratorial ideology, which encouraged discrimination, hatred and violence against immigrants and refugees”, said the PJ in a statement this week.
CM’s editorial director general Carlos Rodrigues has commented in an opinion column today that the PJ are to be congratulated for their efforts. “The danger that this kind of group represents cannot be undervalued. It represents a serious threat to the State of democratic Law, one of the leading collective assets of a free and modern society like ours in which all citizens are equal before the law (…) You don’t play with democracy.” ND
