Convicted of Torture in Brazil, Three Fugitives Spent Years Hidden in Portugal Until Interpol Caught Up
Three Brazilians convicted of torturing patients at a rehab clinic evaded arrest for twelve years by living quietly in Portugal — one as a dance instructor in the Azores — until an Interpol notice led to their arrest. They now await extradition to Brazil.
For nearly a decade, one of the people Brazilian justice most wanted was, it turns out, teaching dance in a village on the Azorean island of São Miguel. That is the striking detail at the centre of a case that has surfaced in Portugal this week: three Brazilians convicted of torturing patients at a rehabilitation clinic evaded arrest for twelve years by building quiet lives in Portugal — until an Interpol alert caught up with them.
The three — Marluci Bellini, 48; the psychologist Djalma António Henares Júnior; and Djalma's nephew, Angelo Bellini Neto — were each sentenced by a Brazilian court to 17 years and six months in prison for torture, aggravated kidnapping and criminal association. The crimes, according to the Brazilian prosecution, were committed at a clinic for people with alcohol and drug dependence in Ribeirão Preto, in the state of São Paulo, between March 2012 and August 2014. Marluci was the clinic's co-owner and legal representative.
A twelve-year flight
Prosecutors described a pattern of systematic abuse of the people in the clinic's care — beatings, sexual assaults and the forced administration of medication. The three left Brazil before arrest warrants were issued in 2014, and the case then wound through the Brazilian courts for more than a decade before the convictions became final. In that time they settled in Portugal: Marluci spent around nine years living in the parish of Nordeste, on São Miguel, working as a dance instructor, while Djalma established himself on the mainland.
What ended the arrangement was the exhaustion of their appeals. Once the sentence was definitive, Brazil sought their capture internationally, and an Interpol red notice was issued in June 2026. Portugal's Polícia Judiciária located and detained Djalma on the mainland in early July and arrested Marluci in São Miguel later the same month. Both are now in preventive detention while the courts consider their extradition to Brazil.
How extradition works from here
The case is a reminder that a conviction abroad does not simply vanish across a border. Portugal and Brazil are bound by extradition arrangements — as fellow members of the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries and through bilateral judicial-cooperation treaties — and a final criminal sentence backed by an Interpol notice is exactly the kind of request those mechanisms are built to handle. The decision now rests with the Portuguese courts, which must weigh the formal request, the detainees' rights and any objections before authorising surrender; the process can take months, and the detention is designed to prevent another disappearance in the meantime.
Two points are worth underlining. The convictions are Brazilian, obtained in Brazil's courts, and it is those verdicts — not any accusation arising in Portugal — that underpin the arrests. And the reporting that brought the story to light this week concerns the extradition proceedings; the detentions themselves took place in July. For a large Brazilian community in Portugal, the episode is an uncomfortable outlier rather than anything representative — but it is also a demonstration that the machinery for tracing and returning fugitives, however slowly, does eventually turn.
