“One slash of knife was sufficient to cause death”
A 34-year-old mother of three was brutally murdered in a carpark in Lourinhã on Monday night. According to reports, her throat was slit. “A single knife slash was sufficient to cause death”, writes tabloid Correio da Manhã today as PJ police try to unravel this horror and find the guilty party or parties.
Sara Carratalana, despite her young age, leaves behind three children aged between 17 and 10.
According to CM, “officially she worked as a real estate consultant, but in Lourinhã she was known for the help she gave the Hindustani community in the region”.
Sara lived with her Pakistani employer, adds the paper, who himself was the victim of a “brutal aggression at the beginning of this year. He suffered various fractures – some of them exposed – and spent weeks interned in hospital”.
Investigators will now be trying to determine whether there is a link between the beating and Sara’s murder shortly after 10pm on Monday.
The circumstances of this incident involve a trip Sara and her partner took to “meet with someone to whom (Sara) was making a payment.
“She got out of the vehicle at 10pm and walked alone to the carpark at the back of Lourinhã Social Security (office). Minutes later she was found, bleeding out, with her throat cut and signs of having been hit over the head”, writes Correio da Manhã.
Residents in the area admit to having heard a discussion/ argument at the time “but nothing that would indicate such a violent crime”, says the paper.
While all this was happening, Sara’s partner was waiting for her to return in the couple’s vehicle.
But it was woman out walking her dog who raised the alert, CM continues, “even before Sara’s partner, concerned about the delay, left the vehicle to go and find her”.
Paramedics and firefighters called to the scene were faced with a ‘fait accompli’. Death was declared; the GNR passed the case immediately to the PJ which carried out searches of the area well into the small hours of the next morning. Even recycling bins were gone through, in hopes of finding the murder weapon, but so far, this has not been identified.
CM adds that Sara Carratalana lived ‘maritally’ with her partner whom family members and friends refer to as her employer.
To SIC Notícias, one of her brothers, Bruno Silva, said: “From what I have been told, she went to make a payment and (the partner) stayed in the vehicle waiting for her. That’s what he told me over the phone: that she was going to make a payment and said ‘wait a minute and I will be back’. After 10, 15 minutes more or less, she hadn’t returned and he went to look for her”.
Multiple reports stress that the “hypothesis of domestic violence has been discarded”.
natasha.donn@portugalresident.com
