Twenty-Two Months After Cova da Moura, the Officer Who Shot Odair Moniz Is Back on Duty and the PSP Will Not Say in What Role

The Polícia de Segurança Pública (Public Security Police) officer convicted in June of killing Odair Moniz is back at work. RTP and SIC Notícias reported on Wednesday 26 August that Bruno Pinto has resumed service, and that the force declined to say what duties he has been given or which unit he has joined. Twenty-two months after the shooting in Cova da Moura, and with the Public Prosecutor's appeal still unheard, the officer is once again a serving policeman.

Nothing about that is irregular in the narrow legal sense, which is precisely what makes the case worth following. The suspension that kept him off duty was a court measure, not a punishment, and the court that convicted him let it lapse.

How the suspension ended

Pinto shot Moniz on 21 October 2024, during a police operation in the Cova da Moura neighbourhood in Amadora, on the northern edge of Lisbon. The defence maintained throughout that Moniz had been holding a knife. In February 2025 an investigating judge imposed suspension from duties as a coercive measure while the case ran, over the objection of the officer, who had asked to keep working.

On 15 June 2026 the Tribunal de Sintra (Sintra Court) convicted him and handed down three years and six months, suspended in its execution, meaning no time in prison. The bench found that the knife the defence had described was not proven to exist, a finding that had been the central contested point since the closing arguments in May, when a forensic examination of the blade could not tie it to Moniz.

Because the conviction did not carry a judicial ban on exercising police functions, the coercive suspension fell away with the ruling. From that moment the decision on whether Pinto returned to a uniform belonged to the PSP alone, and in June the force said it was waiting for formal notice of the judgment before deciding. That decision has now been taken, and the force has not explained it publicly.

Three separate tracks, and only one has finished

It is easy to read "convicted, and back on duty" as a contradiction. It is more accurate to see three processes running at different speeds.

• The criminal case is not over. The sentence has not become final. The Public Prosecutor's Office has appealed to the Tribunal da Relação de Lisboa (Lisbon Court of Appeal), and, as Diário de Notícias reported on 7 August, prosecutor Pedro Pereira argues the officer acted with direct intent to kill and rejects the self-defence framing outright, singling out the second shot at an already wounded man as, in his words, cold and calculated. The appeal asks for at least five years, the threshold at which a Portuguese sentence stops being suspendable and becomes prison time, plus expulsion from the PSP. If the appeal court sets aside self-defence altogether, the prosecution asks for at least eight years.
• The disciplinary case is not over either. The Inspeção-Geral da Administração Interna (Inspectorate-General of Internal Administration), the interior ministry's police watchdog, opened a disciplinary process in March 2025 and it runs independently of the courts. The PSP does not control it, which is part of why the force spent months saying it could not pre-empt the outcome.
• The employment decision was the PSP's own, and it has been made. This is the only one of the three that has produced a result, and it is the one the force will not discuss in detail.

In June, four days after the verdict, PSP national director Luís Carrilho addressed the case in terms that were widely read as supportive of the officer while formally even-handed: in a democratic state governed by law, he said, nobody is above the law, not police officers, and above all not police officers who enforce the law.

Why this one lands harder than the file suggests

The Moniz shooting triggered several nights of unrest across the Lisbon metropolitan area in late October 2024 and remains the reference point in Portugal for arguments about police use of firearms in racialised neighbourhoods. The June sentence brought protesters back onto the street. The return to duty, arriving quietly and without a stated posting, lands into a summer in which several other cases have been moving through the system at once: the Lisbon torture inquiry that gained six more months of investigation this week, the Olhão trial opening on 8 September over the death of a handcuffed man, and an internal inquiry into two officers accused of not helping a fatally stabbed man at Cais do Sodré.

Taken together, those files are what will shape the political conversation about policing when parliament returns in September, rather than any single verdict.

What This Means for Foreign Residents

• Suspension is not dismissal, and conviction is not the end. Portuguese criminal procedure separates the coercive measures applied during an investigation from the penalties applied at judgment, and separates both from the employer's own disciplinary track. A first-instance conviction that is under appeal has no final legal effect. If you follow Portuguese court reporting, "condenado" rarely means the matter is closed.
• The five-year line matters. Under the Código Penal, a prison sentence of up to five years can be suspended in its execution. That is why the prosecution's appeal is framed around a five-year floor rather than a headline number: it is the difference between a suspended sentence and time served.
• Complaints about police conduct go to IGAI, not to the police station. The Inspeção-Geral da Administração Interna takes complaints against PSP and GNR officers directly, in writing and online, and its process is separate from any criminal complaint you might file with the Ministério Público. Filing one does not replace the other.
• Expect the appeal to take months, not weeks. Appeals to the Tribunal da Relação are decided on the written record and, in a case of this profile, a decision inside the current judicial year would be quick by Portuguese standards.

The next fixed point is procedural rather than dramatic: the Lisbon Court of Appeal has to rule on whether three and a half years suspended was an adequate answer to an unarmed man shot twice. Until it does, Portugal has a police officer serving in uniform whose conviction for killing a member of the public is on the record but not yet final, and a police force that has decided where to put him without saying where.