By Giovana Sanchez
On April 13, a Brazilian court sentenced Marcos Bruno Silva de Oliveira to 18 years in prison for involvement in the 2012 murder of journalist Décio Sá. This is Oliveira’s second trial; he appealed the first sentenced and had it annulled.
According to site G1, "Oliveira is identified as the motorcyclist who helped confessed murderer Jhonathan de Sousa Silva to escape.”
Sá was killed on April 23, 2012 in São Luís after reporting on his blog about a loan sharking scheme in the state.
The convicted murderer, Jhonathan de Sousa Silva is in jail; in 2015, the court increased his sentence from 25 to 27 years in prison.
Other people were arrested in the case, but it is not clear if they were convicted.
For 17 years, Sá worked at the newspaper O Estado do Maranhão and, on the night of the crime, had left the newsroom in the evening and gone to a bar where he was waiting for some friends, according to O Imparcial. There, he was surprised by the gunman who shot him five times before fleeing on a motorcycle.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
