The case of a vicious and unprovoked attack by a PSP officer on a grandfather and his adult son, finally has been judged.
The incident, outside Estádio D. Afonso Henriques in Guimarães, goes back to May 2015 when Silva attacked Benfica supporter, José Magalhães, with his truncheon.
Silva, clearly out of control, also twice punched José’s elderly father in the face when he tried to intervene.
PSP officer Filipe Silva has been ordered by Guimarães Court to pay the family €7,236 “jointly and severally with the Portuguese State” and was sentenced to three years in prison.
Silva’s lawyer said he most likely would be appealing the compensation order and the sentence passed on his client.
Luckily, the attack was captured on film by a Correio da Manhã TV camera man and soon the images were spread across Portugal’s social media platforms.
As for the reasons offered for the brutal attack, the PSP officer, who has a history of ‘over active’ service, claimed he had been insulted and spat at.
Filipe Silva was accused of two counts of aggression, two crimes of falsification of documents and of being economical with the truth. The court proved all the crimes.
During the trial, Filipe Silva admitted the assaults but stressed that he acted that way because he thought he was going to be beaten. He said that he felt "afraid," given the atmosphere of tension that surrounded the game played that day between Vitória and Benfica.
Silva also said that he was caught off guard by the grandfather, an "attack" which he defended with two punches.
"I acted in the way that was possible at that moment of great tension and adrenaline. The amount of force I used did not exceed the maximum limits of the norms," he claimed.
The Public Prosecutor's Office requested the conviction of Filipe Silva, but asked for a non-custodial sentence. In this too, it was successful as Silva will not spend a day in jail, his sentence was suspended.
