Twelve injured in Albufeira after a car drives into the crowd on the Oura strip
The GNR says the car pulled out of a parking space on Rua Francisco Sá Carneiro at around 3am, ignored two orders to stop and drove at the pedestrians and the officers in front of it. One of the twelve is seriously hurt and two are GNR soldiers.
Twelve people were hurt in the early hours of Tuesday in Albufeira when a car drove at pedestrians and at a GNR police line on Rua Francisco Sá Carneiro, the bar-lined street everyone in the Algarve simply calls the Oura strip. One of them is seriously injured. Two are GNR soldiers.
According to the Faro Territorial Command’s account, it began around 3am with a car parked on the public road pulling away. Officers signalled it to stop. The driver did not: he reversed direction, was ordered to stop a second time moments later and instead drove forward, into the pedestrians and the officers, hitting several of them. He struck another vehicle while fleeing, tried to run off on foot, and was intercepted there by the public order intervention unit.
The man, aged 35, was detained on suspicion of aggravated bodily harm, drink-driving and dangerous driving. He blew 1.29 g/l on the breath test — more than double the level at which driving becomes a criminal offence in Portugal — and was also given toxicology tests. The case has gone to the competent court, which decides what restrictions he is held under.
Who was hurt
Eleven of the twelve injuries are minor. The interior ministry said the civilian victims are aged between 18 and 22, which is exactly the crowd that fills that street on a summer night. Two of the injured were taken to Portimão hospital because of the severity of their injuries, and others were treated in Faro. By late Tuesday afternoon most of the twelve had been discharged.
The Oura strip is closed to traffic at night for a reason: past a certain hour it stops being a road and becomes a pedestrian corridor. That is the detail that separates this from an ordinary crash — there were officers on the ground, and there were two orders to stop, before the car moved.
It is not the first time this summer that a night out in a tourist area has ended with injuries and an open investigation. In Lisbon, the Rua Augusta shooting that wounded a Swedish tourist led to a reinforced police presence in the Baixa through August. The GNR says it is still establishing the full circumstances of what happened on the Oura.
Photo: Kolforn / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
