An attack by armed police on a father and grandfather, in front of two young children, has shocked the nation and left an ugly mark on last night’s Benfica football victory.
The horror is splashed all over newspapers this morning with a video showing the extreme violence doing the rounds on social media.
As one newspaper explained: “The PSP barbarically attacked a family of Benfica fans beside the stadium after the game last night.”
An inquiry is now underway, while the family decides whether it is going ahead with legal action.
According to a report by Sol newspaper, the father – identified as José Magalhães from Matosinhos – has been made an “arguido” (official suspect) in the PSP case against him.
But as is clear from the video, Magalhães was taken by surprise by a policeman who appears to lay into him abruptly, and then violently punch Magalhães’ elderly father twice in the head.
The policeman is backed by others, one of which, in riot gear, restrains Magalhães as the policeman who started the attack lays into the man with his police baton.
The video shows Magalhães’ children in tears, with the younger one restrained by an agent in full riot gear.
According to Sol, the attack happened after the 43-year-old father brought his boys, aged nine and 13, out of the stadium in the furore of Benfica’s win over Guimarães.
He was “desperate to get the children to safety” as the family had been “stuck inside the stadium” for three-quarters of an hour and the children “were panicking”.
“I had to get them out,” Magalhães told Sol. “We were suffocating in there.”
But when he had brought his family to safety, the businessman and his elderly father were approached by Comandante Filipe Silva who is understood to have asked him why he was exiting from that particular gateway.
The “conversation” took a wrong turn when Magalhães was apparently asked why he had taken the children to the match in the first place.
He told Sol that he had informed his inquisitor that he could take his children wherever he wanted. The video shows him raising his hands. That – and the fact that he told police they were doing a bad job – seems to have prompted the attack which, from the video, appears to have been totally disproportionate to the situation in hand.
Magalhães is understood to have showed his bruises to journalists as he was released hours later from the PSP police station in Guimarães.
What is not known is the state of health of his father, who is brutally pushed out of the frame of the video as the police continue to lay into his son.
As Sol called it, it was a “sad situation” that has cast a heavy shadow over what should have been a night of celebration for all Benfica fans.
See video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUz7ii1l-Bs
