Vice President Cristina Kirchner was greeted by a crowd of supporters as she arrived at her home in Buenos Aires on Thursday night (1st) when a man, identified by police as 35-year-old Brazilian Fernando Sabag Montiel, tried to shoot her. . The attacker has been arrested and the attack is being investigated by the police.
The incident prompted statements of solidarity from several global leaders, and refers to a series of attacks against influential political figures in history. Check out some of them below.
Jair Bolsonaro
On September 6, 2018, the then presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais. The attack took place while Bolsonaro was hand-to-hand (walking among people during a campaign act) on the Calçadão da Rua Halfeld, in the center of the city.
The stab was perpetrated by Adélio Bispo de Oliveira, 40 years old at the time, born in Montes Claros, a city in the north of Minas Gerais. After the attack, he tried to flee, but was stopped by people present at the scene and, later, arrested and taken away by the Federal Police, who booked him in flagrante delicto for the crime.
After investigation, the agency concluded that Adélio acted for political reasons, but that he suffers from a mental disorder. He was improperly acquitted in 2019, that is, he was not sentenced to a sentence, but began to fulfill some security measure – in this case, he was hospitalized instead of preventive detention.
Pope John Paul II
On May 13, 1981, the then pontiff was shot in front of 10,000 faithful in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. The perpetrator of the crime was the young Turkish Mehmet Ali Agca, who despite being only 23 years old, had already murdered a journalist in his home country.
Agca was sentenced to life imprisonment and taken to the Montacuto prison in Ancona. John Paul II forgave him while still in his hospital bed, where he was recovering from serious injuries from the attack, and visited him in prison on December 28, 1983. The pope also received the terrorist’s mother at the Vatican in 1985.
In March 1999, Agca wrote to the Turkish ambassador in Rome to say that he missed his homeland and wanted to serve his sentence for the journalist’s murder. In 2000, Agca was extradited from Italy to Turkey, where he remained in prison for other crimes committed before the attack. He was released in January 2010.
(More info in a moment.)
