The Rato Police Trial Began on Friday With Thirty-Six Charges Against Two Officers, and the Indictment Says Most Victims Were Foreign or Homeless

The trial of two PSP officers from the Rato station in Lisbon, accused of torture and rape, began on Friday morning at half past nine. It is the case that has done more than any other in recent years to force a public argument about what happens inside Portuguese police stations, and the charge sheet is unusually detailed.

According to the prosecution, between July 2024 and March 2025 the two officers beat people they had arrested with punches, slaps and pistol-whipping to the head, and filmed and photographed some of those episodes and the people involved. In some cases they are accused of sodomising, or attempting to sodomise, detained men with an object.

Twenty-Nine Charges and Seven

The main defendant is 22 years old and has been in pre-trial detention since his arrest in July 2025. He faces 29 charges: six of torture, five of rape of which four are attempts and one is completed, seven of abuse of power, three of aggravated assault, two of document forgery, one of aggravated theft, one of violation of correspondence, two of robbery and two of possession of a prohibited weapon.

The second officer, aged 26 and also arrested in July 2025, faces seven charges: two of torture, three of abuse of power, one of assault and one of possession of a prohibited weapon. He is currently under house arrest.

The case went through an instruction phase, the stage at which a Portuguese investigating judge decides whether the prosecution has enough to justify a trial. The judge found there were sufficient indications that the officers committed the crimes charged, and a serious probability that they would be convicted at the end of a trial.

Who the Prosecution Says the Victims Were

The indictment describes the victims as mostly drug users, people who had committed minor offences, many of them foreign nationals without regular status in Portugal, or people living on the street. That list is not incidental to how the case is understood. Each category describes someone with a reduced practical capacity to complain: a person whose residence status is irregular has an obvious reason not to walk into a police station to report the police.

The prosecution also states that some of the images of the abuse were shared in WhatsApp groups with dozens of other PSP officers. That allegation is what separates this from a case about two men. It is the basis on which the investigation has continued to widen: in August the inquiry into the wider circle of officers was granted six more months, with prosecutors saying substantially more officers were involved than they had first counted.

What the Defence Is Arguing

The defence has begun contesting the physical evidence. Lawyers for one of the officers argue that the baton said to have been used in an alleged rape did not carry the victim's DNA.

Two things are worth separating as the trial proceeds. The first is the narrow question a court will answer: whether these two officers committed these acts, on these dates, against these people, to the criminal standard. The second is the wider question the trial does not settle, which is how footage of that kind circulated among dozens of serving officers without any of them reporting it, and what that says about the internal culture the PSP leadership has spent the past year insisting is not representative.

For residents who are not Portuguese nationals, the practical point is the one the indictment itself makes. A complaint against a police officer can be filed with the PSP's own inspectorate, with the Inspeção-Geral da Administração Interna, which is independent of the police forces, or directly with the Ministério Público. Immigration status does not remove the right to make one.