The trial concerning the murder of a Luxembourg resident in Portugal in 2021 concluded on Wednesday with life sentences for all three defendants.
The main defendant – referred to as “Ana” in RTL’s reports on the trial – along with her mother and her mother’s partner, with whom Ana had a secret relationship, each received a life sentence. However, the court acquitted Ana’s son. It ruled it had no jurisdiction over him, as he was not involved in planning the murder, which was orchestrated in Luxembourg. The court agreed with the prosecution’s argument on this point, though it acknowledged the son may have later assisted in disposing of the victim’s body in a river near Figueira da Foz.
In civil damages, the main defendant’s daughter, who joined the case as a civil party, was awarded €80,000. The siblings of the victim, referred to as “Pedro”, were collectively awarded €72,000.
Throughout the trial, the defendants gave conflicting accounts of events, all of which were contradicted by the physical evidence. Ana admitted that Pedro was poisoned on the night of 4-5 August 2021. She stated that insecticide for potato beetles was mixed into a drink, and to convince him to consume it, she proposed marriage and they toasted to their engagement.
Later that night, when Pedro became violently ill, his family members took him to a river and pushed him into the water. They had not accounted for the tides, however, and his body was discovered the following morning in an estuary.
Ana also confessed to attempting to poison Pedro – her official partner and the adoptive father of her daughter – with rat poison the day before the murder. That attempt failed because the poison did not properly dissolve in the liquid.
Her lover, “Antonio”, testified about a separate prior attempt in which Ana had mixed sulphuric acid into Pedro’s sangria. Evidence presented at trial further suggested that Ana and her mother had tried to kill Pedro in Luxembourg before the holiday in Portugal. On that occasion, they reportedly administered a heavy dose of laxatives without his knowledge, hoping he would become dizzy and fall from scaffolding at his construction site.
Although the murder was carried out in Portugal, the trial was held in Luxembourg because the conspiracy to kill the victim was planned within the Grand Duchy.
Testimony revealed that weeks, if not months, before the killing, the defendants gathered at the dinner table of Ana’s mother in Esch-sur-Alzette to deliberate over which poison to use. In one notable instance, Antonio researched online which poisons would be untraceable.
