http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3941281

Portuguese hero to face terror charges

Eduardo Goncalves in Lisbon

Guardian

Monday December 13, 1999

The hugely popular man credited with bringing democracy to Portugal goes on trial today accused of terrorism.

Lieutenant Colonel Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho is among 63 alleged members of a group accused of carrying out bomb attacks and murders that left 18 people dead and dozens injured. On April 25 1974, Otelo - as he is popularly known - masterminded the peaceful military coup that overthrew Portugal's 50-year-old fascist dictatorship and ended the country's unpopular colonial wars in Africa.

But he is now accused of leading FP-25, a leftwing group which carried out a series of attacks on wealthy businessmen and Nato bases during the 1980s, including a mortar attack on a British naval ship docked in Lisbon.

Portuguese newspapers have called the justice ministry's sudden announcement of the trial "surprising". The timing of the trial coincides with the department's decision not to investigate another terrorism scandal, in which members of the current administration are accused of being involved in the assassination of a prime minister and the subsequent cover-up.

It has emerged that in its rush to schedule the trial, a number of key defendants and witnesses have yet to be notified by justice officials.

Otelo was tried and found guilty in 1984 of terrorist charges in controversial circumstances that prompted hundreds of academics and politicians from around the world to call for his release.

The then French president, François Mitterrand, proclaimed that Otelo was "the Portuguese [Soviet dissident Andrei] Sakharov", and he was later freed at the demand of Portugal's president, Antonio dos Santos Ramalho Eanes.

The announcement of a retrial has eclipsed the growing political row over secret new evidence that the death in 1980 of the country's then prime minister, Francisco Lumbrales de Sa Carneiro, was a deliberate assassination, and not an accident, as has always been officially maintained.

The official explanation for Carneiro's death is that the light aircraft he was travelling on crashed when the pilot lost control shortly after taking off from Lisbon.

But two former members of Commandos in Defence of Western Civilisation (Codeco), a rightwing terrorist group, now admit that two known bombers planted a device on the plane.

The Guardian has seen a suppressed report which shows that traces of explosives were found by investigators on the plane and on shrapnel in bodies of the crash victims.

Witness statements by former Codeco members made in secret to a parliamentary inquiry team have also emerged. They accuse Lencastre Bernardo, now the head of the Portugal's immigration and customs service, of being a leading member of the group who helped cover up the bombers' tracks.

The justice ministry caused a public outcry last week when it denied there was any new evidence and said it would be taking no further action over the Carneiro case. Its announcement of the retrial of Otelo shortly afterwards has prompted critics to accuse it of "diversionary tactics".

Otelo claims that branches of the Popular Unity Front, a political party he formed in 1980, were secretly infiltrated by members of the FP-25 terrorist group. The prosecution alleges that his party was a legal front for the bombers and that Otelo was personally responsible for the deaths of a prisons director and a four-month-old baby.

Many of the group's estimated 250 members were rounded up by police in 1984, shortly after an abortive kidnap attempt on the country's finance minister, Cavaco Silva.

Some members have claimed that the movement had links to the IRA, the Italian Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof gang. Others said money was funnelled to the group by the Libyan president, Colonel Gadafy.