Two thugs accosted a 70-year-old woman as she was leaving the cemetery in Albufeira after attending a funeral just before Christmas, and robbed her of a gold necklace and rings worth several hundred euros.
The robbers, identified as “young, dark-skinned and badly dressed”, left their victim distressed and with bleeding hands and bruises after brutally forcing the items off her neck and fingers.
The woman was on her way to the home of one of her family who lives in the region when she was waylaid by the two men.
It was the latest in a spate of similar street crimes in the Algarve during 2012 in which thieves, often using violence, have mugged pedestrians and taken gold jewellery.
