A Brazilian court sentenced Francoise de Souza Oliveira to 31 years in prison for the murder of her husband, the Ambassador of Greece to Brazil Kyriakos Amiridis, authorities announced on Sunday.
The murder plot also involved her lover, Sergio Gomes Moreira Filho, a Brazilian military policeman. The two had painstakingly planned the execution of the ambassador over the Christmas holidays in 2016.
The couple had married in 2004 when he served Greece as consul in Rio de Janeiro and they had one ten-year old daughter together.
The ambassador had only served in his post for less than a year, after serving as Greece’s ambassador to Libya from 2012 to 2016.
Amiridis, who was 59 at the time of his death in 2016, lived in the capital city of Brasilia but was on vacation with his family in Rio de Janeiro. Just several days after Christmas, the remains of the ambassador were located in his burned-out rental car in a poor neighborhood in Nova Iguacu, near the state capital.
The television channel Globo showed images of a burned-out white car in Nova Iguacu, where the ambassador was reported to have been visiting friends, reporting that the license plate on the car matched that of Amiridis’ rental car.
Greece ambassador’s wife reported him missing
Amiridis’ wife reported to police two days after his actual death that her husband had left the house and not returned.
Police who investigated the disappearance later found blood on a sofa in the family’s rental unit and security camera footage that implicated de Souza Oliveira and her lover.
Moreira, the ambassador’s wife’s lover, then confessed, saying he killed Amiridis at the home and then moved the corpse to the car, later driving to the spot where it was found burned.
The two were initially sentenced to 22 years in prison, without parole.
Judge Anna Christina da Silveira Fernandes, of the 4th Criminal Court of Nova Iguacu, stated after the sentencing “The circumstances of the crime are atypical, since (the ambassador) was executed during the Christmas holidays… this family was torn apart.”
In her remarks at the sentencing she stated that “the crime was carefully thought out, premeditated,” by De Souza Oliveira.
“According to the testimony collected, the defendant planned and designed, being the mastermind behind the entire macabre plot,” the judge noted.
A third defendant, Eduardo Moreira Tedeschi de Melo, who is a cousin of Gomes Moreira Filho, was acquitted of the murder charge levied against him; however, he was sentenced to one year’s probation for helping to hide the body and receiving money for that deed. He was then freed, since he was sentenced to time served.
There were a total of eighteen witnesses in the trial on conspiracy to commit murder, which lasted for three days, until last Friday.
The judge also referred to the trust placed in the military policeman by the public and the state.
“He swore to defend society and not rebel against it… dishonoring the Military Police and all the trust placed in him by the State,” she said.
Judge Fernandes also castigated De Souza Oliveira, saying she “calls herself an ambassador, but has tarnished the name of Brazil and embarrassed the nation with her conduct, given the negative international repercussions of the events.”
Several days after the ambassador’s body was found, the Brazilian government held a funeral for Amiridis with full military honors.
The funeral, which was attended by Brazil’s Deputy Foreign Minister Jose Antonio Marcondes de Carvalho, took place at Geleao Air Force Base in Rio de Janeiro.
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