Authorities said Tuesday they believed the killing of the police commander who led Brazil’s bloodiest-ever prison massacre was a crime of passion and not the work of professional hit men.
Col. Ubiratan Guimaraes, 63, was found dead Sunday at home in Sao Paulo. He bled to death from a gunshot wound in the abdomen.
The murder of Guimaraes, who was a symbol of police brutality for his role in the 1992 Carandiru prison uprising where 111 inmates were killed, has gripped Brazil.
Newspapers ran several pages on the case, highlighting a hot public debate about whether police should be given more leeway to crack down on violent crime.
Guimaraes, who was elected to the Sao Paulo state legislature after retiring from the police force, frequently received death threats, his aides said. To protect himself, he drove an armored car and always carried a gun.
But police said Guimaraes, who was running for re-election, appeared to have been killed by an acquaintance. They based their theory on the fact that investigators found no evidence of forced entry or robbery, and the last person seen with him was his girlfriend, Carla Cepollina.
“We’re not ruling out any hypotheses, but the main suspicion is that it was a crime of passion,” a police spokeswoman said.
Cepollina, a 40-year-old criminal defense attorney, was set to be interrogated by police Tuesday.
‘Crime of a personal nature’
Guimaraes is the second official involved in the massacre to suffer a violent death. Jose Ismael Pedrosa, the prison’s former warden, was gunned down last year in Sao Paulo in a hit that has been linked to a powerful prison gang called the First Command of the Capital, or PCC.
But authorities said the PCC, which has unleashed several attacks on police in Sao Paulo in recent months, was not responsible for Guimaraes’ death.
“It has zero to do with the PCC and organized crime,” Sao Paulo state Gov. Claudio Lembo told reporters Monday. “This was clearly a crime of a personal nature.”
In 2001, Guimaraes was sentenced to 632 years in prison for leading what has become known as the Carandiru massacre. The massacre was portrayed in an acclaimed 2003 film “Carandiru,” directed by Hector Babenco.
At Guimaraes’ trial, witnesses testified that police slaughtered unarmed inmates, shooting them at close range after they surrendered.
An appeals court annulled the sentence last February, outraging international human rights groups, who have long complained that police in Brazil operate outside the law.
“We have lost in an unfortunate way a professional who dedicated his life to combating crime,” Luiz Antonio Fleury, who was governor of Sao Paulo state at the time of the massacre, told Folha de S. Paulo newspaper.