These three suspects, were arrested on Monday by the Judiciary Police and are indicted for the same consummated crime of qualified homicide as five other defendants, aged between 22 and 45, who had already been detained on 16 January.
The difference is that while the group of five is suspected of three crimes of attempted murder related to the alleged assaults on other members of Giovani’s group, the three new suspects were indicted only for offense to qualified physical integrity.
The five detainees in January were remanded in custody after being heard in court and two of them were, however, changed the coercion measure, starting to await the process of house arrest.
Cape Verdean student Giovani Rodrigues was found alone on a street in Bragança on December 21 and died 10 days later in a hospital in Porto.
The young man had gone out with three more Cape Verdean friends and other members of the group would have disagreed with other young people in a city bar.
According to reports that have been made public, the alleged assailants are said to have waited for the four Cape Verdeans on the street and the assaults have occurred on Avenida Sá Carneiro.
Giovani was found by a PSP patrol, several meters away from the locations of the initial occurrences, lying on the floor with signs of excess alcohol.
The rescue was called for a case of “intoxication” and the firefighters only realized the head injury after observing the victim, who they transported to the hospital in Bragança.
It was the hospital that alerted the PSP, in the same dawn, to the fact that the victim could have been attacked.
The Cape Verdean was transported to the hospital of Santa António, in Porto, where he died ten days later, on December 31.
The death of the young man, who had arrived in the region just over a month ago to study at the Mirandela school of the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança (IPB), prompted institutional reactions from Portugal and Cape Verde.
The calls for justice and non-violence were also translated into marches in honor of the young Cape Verdean, on January 11th.
Both the police and judicial authorities stressed that “there was no evidence that the facts committed by the defendants were determined by racial hatred or generated by the color, ethnic origin or nationality of the victims”.
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