Supreme Court Orders a Fresh Psychiatric Review in the Ismaili Centre Killings, Reopening the Case a Second Time
The Supreme Court of Justice has ordered a new, multi-disciplinary psychiatric evaluation of the man convicted of the 2023 Ismaili Centre killings in Lisbon, reopening the question of his criminal responsibility for a second time in four months.
One of the most disputed murder cases in recent Portuguese memory has been sent back to the experts. The Supreme Court of Justice (Supremo Tribunal de Justiça) has ordered a new psychiatric evaluation of the man convicted of the 2023 killings at the Ismaili Centre (Centro Ismaili) in Lisbon — the second time in four months the court has forced part of the case to be reopened.
The crime and the conviction
On 28 March 2023, Abdul Bashir, an Afghan citizen now aged 31, attacked staff at the Ismaili Centre in Lisbon, stabbing to death two women — aged 24 and 49 — who worked in the centre's refugee-support service, and attempting to attack others. In June 2025 the Central Criminal Court of Lisbon (Juízo Central Criminal de Lisboa) sentenced him to 25 years in prison, the maximum penalty available under Portuguese law, a decision upheld in March 2026.
What the Supreme Court has now reopened is not the conviction itself, but the question that determines how Bashir should be punished: his criminal responsibility, or imputabilidade. In Portuguese law the distinction is decisive. A defendant judged imputável — fully responsible — serves a prison sentence. One judged inimputável — not criminally responsible by reason of mental illness — is instead routed to a security and treatment measure rather than to ordinary jail.
Judges versus doctors
The case has become an unusually public clash between the courts and the medical profession. The trial judges twice preferred a psychologist's assessment — that Bashir was not acting under the effect of a mental anomaly when he killed — over a contrary psychiatric view pointing toward diminished or absent responsibility. Psychiatrists have objected that the court overstepped its competence in declaring him fully responsible against expert findings.
The Supreme Court has now sided with the call for a more rigorous process. It ordered a fresh evaluation that must be "collegial, in the psychiatric field, with the participation of a psychology specialist." In its reasoning, the court noted that several provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure (Código de Processo Penal) — particularly in complex cases involving a diagnosis of schizophrenia and the assessment of personality disorders such as psychopathy — "call for collegiality or interdisciplinarity of expert evaluations." In other words, a single examiner's opinion is not enough to settle a question this consequential.
Why it matters
Beyond the specifics of a harrowing case, the ruling is a statement about how Portugal's justice system handles defendants whose mental state is contested. By insisting on a multi-disciplinary panel before a sentence can stand, the Supreme Court is drawing a clearer line between the court's role and the clinician's — and signalling that, where liberty and the form of confinement turn on a psychiatric judgment, the evidence must be built to a higher standard.
For the families of the two women killed in 2023, it also means continued uncertainty. More than three years on, the central legal question of the case — whether the man who took their lives belongs in a prison or a secure hospital — remains, once again, unresolved.
