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Brazilian men sentenced over mutilations

Associated Press, USA
Aug. 31, 2003
From correspondents in Rio De Janeiro
www.heraldsun.news.com.au

ReligionNewsBlog.com • Sunday August 31, 2003

A court in Brazil has sentenced two men to decades in prison for participating in the murder and ritual mutilation of several young boys between 1989 and 1992.

A jury in Belem, 2400km northwest of Rio de Janeiro, sentenced businessman Amailton Madeira Gomes, to 57 years of prison for the murder of three children killed in the western Amazon city of Altamira.

The jury also sentenced Carlos Alberto dos Santos Lima, a former policeman, to 35 years of prison for the killing of one of the boys and attempted homicide of two others, the Para state justice court said on its Web site yesterday.

The lawyers of the convicted said they would appeal the sentence, the court said.

Several boys disappeared between 1989 and 1992. Six were found dead, with their genitals mutilated. Three more were mutilated, but survived, and five are still listed as missing.

One of the surviving boys, now 23, said he recognized Santos Lima as the man who raped him when he was 10, and then took him into a forest where he was mutilated.

The defendants, who authorities said were members of an alleged satanic group, the Superior Universal Alignment sect, had only been charged with three murders and two mutilations.

The sect’s leader, a 75-year-old woman named Valentina Andrade, and two more defendants, both doctors, will be tried separately on Tuesday, the court said.