Homicide || A family drama of horrific proportions played out in Soure this week, leaving a woman dead and her estranged husband fighting for his life in hospital.
The horror began with 50-year-old António Cavaleiro slitting his wife’s throat with a kitchen knife.
According to news reports, the couple were in the process of divorce and Maria do Carmo had just moved out of the matrimonial home when her husband burst into the home she was renting and killed her.
Neighbours alerted the couple’s 28-year-old son Ricardo, who is then reported to have set off after his father who fled the scene on a motorbike.
The two were then involved in what newspapers describe as a collision.
Cavaleiro was projected from his bike some metres and taken to Coimbra university hospital in a “serious condition”.
His son Ricardo is reported to have waited for police to arrive after the collision. He was taken first to the GNR police station in Montemor-o-Velho and then transported by the PJ to Coimbra.
As anyone who has been reading the Resident this year will have realised, this is yet another example of the national tendency for domestic violence that seems to be ever-increasing in Portugal.
2014 started on a terrible note, with three women losing their lives to domestic violence on the same weekend in January, and only last month two shocking cases hit the headlines: one of a dentist knifed to death by her former partner, and another of a divorce lawyer whose head was repeatedly smashed against a wall until she died by the enraged husband of a client.
