A star goalkeeper in Brazil is serving jail time for the gruesome murder of his girlfriend after she refused to abort their unborn son.
The NZ Herald reports Bruno Fernandes de Souza was convicted of murdering his girlfriend Eliza Samudio in 2010. According to the report, he allegedly paid someone to kidnap and murder her. Samudio allegedly was tortured for several days before she was killed, and then her body was butchered and fed to his rottweilers, according to court testimony.
Bruno has been in prison since 2013, but new reports indicate he will receive day release to teach children soccer. The news is causing outrage in the public and Samudio’s family.
Here’s more from the report:
The arrangement, which is part of the government’s social inclusion programme for prisoners, means the sportsman will be giving hour-long lessons, Monday to Friday, to youngsters at the Nucleus of Training for Peace (Nucap) in Varginha.
The announcement has outraged Samudio’s mother, Sonia Moura, who spoke exclusively to MailOnline.
She said: ‘This is absurd. How is he allowed to teach football when he doesn’t even have a physical education qualification which everyone teaching sports must have in Brazil?
‘This is another case of the law being bent to suit and excuse the privileged in our society.’
Married with children, Bruno reportedly had an affair with the 25-year-old Samudio and got her pregnant. According to previous reports, Bruno pressured Samudio to abort their unborn son, but she refused.
Click here to sign up for pro-life news alerts from LifeNews.com
Eliza’s friend Milena Baroni, 25, a law student from Rio, told The Daily Beast in 2010: “He wanted her to get rid of the baby, abort it. She didn’t want to. She was against abortion.”
She said Eliza told her that Bruno “kidnapped her and tried to force her to abort. Including he put a gun in her face. She went to the police about this.” Baroni added: “In my opinion, something has happened to her, I wish it wasn’t so.”
Bruno allegedly put a gun to Samudio’s head and told her, “You don’t know who I am or what I’m capable of – I’m from the favela.”
Police said Bruno later arranged to have Samudio abducted and murdered. He allegedly paid former military policeman Luiz Santos £8,000 (about $10,000) to murder her, according to the Metro. Police said Bruno watched as Samudio was brutally murdered, and then allegedly helped Santos chop up her body and feed it to his rottweilers.
According to the report, Bruno denied arranging and paying for her murder, but he admitted in 2013 to knowing that she was murdered and her body fed to dogs.
Several months before the murder, Samudio gave birth to their son, Bruninho. Bruno also allegedly kidnapped the infant with his mother just before her murder, according to the Daily Mail.
In 2013, Bruno was sentenced to 22 years in prison. He is appealing his conviction.
Violence against women and abortion often are connected. In the United States, one in six women is first abused during pregnancy, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Sometimes the abuse occurs after the woman refuses her partner’s demands to have an abortion. In a case in Pennsylvania, a man allegedly beat and choked his pregnant girlfriend after she refused to have an abortion in October 2015. LifeNews reported another case in September 2016 where police arrested a Tennessee man after his pregnant girlfriend accused him of kicking and hitting her when she told him that she would not abort their baby.
Several studies also have linked domestic violence to abortion. In these cases, some women were forced or pressured by partners into having abortions, while others believed having an abortion would help them escape abuse.
