Joana Cipriano

Joana Isabel Cipriano Guerreiro (born 31 May 1996) was a Portuguese child who disappeared on 12 August 2004 from Figueira, a village near Portimão in Portugal's Algarve region. An investigation by the Polícia Judiciária (PJ), Portugal's criminal police, concluded that she had been murdered by her mother, Leonor Cipriano, and her uncle, João Cipriano, after witnessing them engaged in incestuous sex. Joana's body was never found; there is no tangible evidence she is dead. Joana's mother and uncle confessed to police in October 2004; her uncle said he had cut the girl's body into pieces before disposing of it by throwing it into a nearby pigsty. Her mother withdrew her confession the day after signing it, alleging that she had been beaten during a 48-hour-long interrogation. Police officers accounted for the bruising on the mother's face and body by maintaining that she had thrown herself down some stairs in the police station in an effort to commit suicide. Both the mother and uncle were convicted of murder and sentenced to sixteen years in jail. It was the first murder trial in Portuguese legal history to take place without the discovery of a body. Five officers were charged with a variety of offences as a result of the allegations of assault; three were acquitted. One of the two officers who was convicted, Chief Inspector Gonçalo Amaral, led the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, a British girl who went missing in May 2007 from the nearby resort town of Praia da Luz. Amaral was not present during the alleged assault, but was accused of having covered up for other officers; he was convicted of having falsified police documents in the case and received an eighteen-month suspended sentence. Several similarities between the Cipriano and McCann cases—both girls vanished without trace within eleven kilometers (seven miles) and three years of each other, both cases had officers who failed to secure the crime scene, both mothers mounted campaigns to find their daughters, and both women were accused of involvement—prompted Cipriano's family to appeal in 2008 for police to investigate whether there was a link between the disappearances.

Lamentos - 2023-11-24T00:00:00.000000Z

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