The start of the trial of 12 people accused of being involved in the theft of 55 Glock weapons from the gunsmith of the PSP national directorate is scheduled for June 18, in the Lisbon judicial court.

According to the Citius portal, two sessions of the trial are already scheduled for the Campus of Justice, the second of which will take place on June 19th.

In this process, the Public Prosecutor’s Office charged 12 people with the theft of PSP weapons, whose crimes were committed between December 2015 and January 2017.

In the prosecution, the MP considers that PSP agent Luis Gaiba took advantage of the poor control of the gunsmith, of which he was responsible, to steal the weapons, estimated at around 20 thousand euros.

Luís Gaiba is accused of criminal association, arms trafficking and mediation, money laundering, possession of a prohibited weapon and embezzlement.

According to the MP, Luís Gaiba realized that the control of weapons was weakened, that his registration was not updated and that, due to the dispersion of the access keys to the facilities, there was no registration of access to the site.

The defects in supervision and control were used by the defendant to steal weapons and sell them in parallel circuits of arms and drug trafficking.

However, the agent, in an attempt that the suspicions of the disappearance of the weapons did not fall on him, denounced the weaknesses of the gunsmith to the PSP national leadership and accessed the database to find out which firearms were not distributed to other policemen .

Subsequently, the prosecution indicates, it initiated contacts with a group of people who could put the weapons in the illicit arms sales circuit.

Luis Gaiba, together with his wife, António Laranginha and João Paulino, these two also accused in the process of theft of military weapons, two storerooms from Tancos, formed a group, which also belonged to Mário Cardoso, Armando Barros and Manuel Neves.

The group, still according to the prosecution, sold the weapons to a group of people who were accused of drug trafficking in Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom and in whose processes it was possible to apprehend some of the pistols.

This case dates back to January 2017, when the disappearance of Glock weapons and their cases, two porters and cleaning kits was detected, after the seizure of a police firearm during a police operation that took place in Porto.

At the time, the Ministry of Internal Affairs requested an audit by the General Inspection of Administration to harmonize the security control mechanisms for the storage of arms and ammunition by security forces.

CC // SB