“You jailed the wrong person (…) I will await my day of freedom and then I will kill you all and cut off your heads”. This threat and many more have come from Gilberto Pinto, a 54-year-old man with hearing deficiencies condemned to six years in jail in 2013 for defamation, slander, threats and gratuitous insults.
Whether Pinto’s behaviour results from any form of mental illness is barely addressed in the article that explains he is accused of writing 15 vitriolic letters over a period of five months that have landed him in the dock once again, this time charged with 34 crimes of aggravated threats and “defamation with calumny” (which anywhere else would mean straightforward libel).
Prosecutors, police and everyone else involved in his imprisonment have “received the death sentence from the Count of Monte Cristo” (Pinto’s apparent alter-ego) who, he claims, will pursue them “to the ends of the earth”.
Lousã judges, who have found him guilty of “similar crimes” four times, writes Correio da Manhã, have been told he will blow up their courtroom, and then hang them.
And the director of the Polícia Judiciária’s HQ has been told: “I am your worst nightmare.”
Indeed, Pinto plans to “attack the PJ building with bottles of gas that will blow it sky high”.
A “new April 25 will come”, Pinto is alleged to have written, “and you are all going to die”.
CM does give a clue however to the fact that Pinto’s problem may well be an affliction.
His “modus operandi” is to insult “people who exercise authority” – and, according to the paper, in many cases his victims are the same people, time and time again.
Thus, the question as to whether Santa Cruz do Bispo prison is the right place for Gilberto Pinto may at last be addressed.
The former draughtsman is due to appear before Coimbra court, while judges in Lousã may be called as witnesses for the prosecution – possibly relieved they are not trying the case themselves.
