Suspect in the Rua Augusta shooting released under fortnightly police check-ins
The man was detained on a domestic violence warrant, questioned by a judge and freed on condition of reporting to a police station every two weeks. The government says it is holding extra officers in Lisbon's tourist areas.
The man detained after the shooting that wounded a Swedish tourist on Rua Augusta, in central Lisbon, has been released. He appeared before a judge for a first questioning and was freed on condition that he reports to his local PSP station every two weeks.
One detail explains the decision and got lost in most of this week’s argument about it. The arrest was not made over the shooting. He was picked up on a warrant issued in a separate domestic violence case, and it was in that case that the judge set his bail conditions. The shooting investigation is still open.
What happened on Rua Augusta
It was the afternoon of Monday 10 August, on one of the busiest streets in the city centre. According to the authorities, a confrontation broke out between two groups and shots were fired.
A Swedish tourist in her forties, inside a pastry shop on Rua Augusta at the time, was hit in the abdomen by a stray bullet. She was taken to Hospital de São José, operated on, and is out of danger.
Lisbon’s mayor, Carlos Moedas, called the release unacceptable.
What changes in the Baixa now
The day after the shooting, the Interior Ministry announced it was reinforcing and maintaining the police presence in the Baixa. The ministry was careful to point out that this did not start this week: since June, officers from the PSP’s Corpo de Intervenção have been posted into the Baixa and other high-density tourist areas to raise visibility.
The city council is coming at it from the commercial side. The Municipal Police and council services will tighten enforcement against illegal and irregular street trading in the area, with particular attention to the operations that degrade public space or occupy it without permission. The government, the police and the council have also committed to jointly assessing the crime picture in these zones and whether the existing tools actually work, which is the part that will show whether this is a week of extra patrols or a genuine change of posture. The reinforcement the ministry is describing comes out of a package announced in May, when the government assigned an extra 400 PSP officers to Lisbon and Porto and sent the Corpo de Intervenção into the busiest urban areas.
The timing matters for a district that lives almost entirely on visitors. It lands in a year when the money side of Portuguese tourism has been shifting from bed counts towards hotel investment, and the Baixa is where that spending is most concentrated and most exposed.
Image: Vitor Oliveira / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
