Lisbon police launched a murder investigation after an autopsy has confirmed the identity of the badly decomposed body, found wrapped in black plastic in a suitcase on waste ground in Fontelas, Loures last Saturday.
The grisly find – chanced upon by young BTT riders, who noticed a “terrible smell” – has been confirmed as the body of an elderly man who went missing last August.
The man’s daughter reported her father’s disappearance, and since then there had been no trace of him.
Lisbon’s homicide division is now “reconstructing the man’s life, and seeking perpetrators of the crime from the circle of people known to him”, writes Correio da Manhã today.
The macabre discovery made CM’s headline on Sunday, with the father of one of the boys who unearthed the suitcase from its covering of rocks, saying: “The minute the GNR opened the case, there was no doubt it was a body. It was covered in black plastic. We only saw the head, in an advanced stage of decomposition”.
According to Observador, police initially thought they were dealing with the body of a child.
Earlier reports pointed to a “young man whose grandfather had disappeared from the area two years previously” having been interviewed by PJ police, but with an identity now confirmed, investigations are starting to hone in on what really happened, and why.
