Camarate, 1980: the plane crash that killed Portugal's prime minister

At about 8.14pm on Thursday 4 December 1980, a twin-engined Cessna 421 with the Venezuelan registration YV-314P left parking stand Delta at Lisbon's Portela airport, bound for Pedras Rubras, the airport of Porto. It carried two pilots and five passengers. Among them were the Prime Minister, Francisco Sá Carneiro, and the Minister of Defence, Adelino Amaro da Costa.1 source1 source

Portugal was three days from a presidential election, and the two ministers were due at a rally in Porto for General António Soares Carneiro, the candidate backed by their parties.2 sources2 sources

The flight was short. According to the reconstruction by the civil aviation authority's inquiry, the aircraft climbed to between 40 and 50 metres, levelled off, cut through the street-lighting cables on the road to the Bairro de São Francisco and hit several obstacles before coming down in a street of the Bairro das Fontainhas, in Camarate. It had flown about 1,700 metres in 38 seconds, and the crash site lay about 500 metres beyond the end of the stretch of runway it had used.1 source1 source

The fire caught several vehicles and parts of nearby houses. Airport fire crews attacked it within minutes, and it was out about 20 minutes later. All seven people on board were found dead in the burnt wreckage.1 source1 source

The night that followed became part of the dispute. Civil aviation investigators and officers of the Polícia Judiciária, the criminal police, began arriving between 10.30 and 11pm. The guard placed on the wreckage by the GNR and PSP police was evaded by unauthorised people who reached the debris, and bodies and wreckage were first moved without any method. Only at about 3am did the authorities gain a minimum of control. Eleven days later a member of the public handed in a piece of the aircraft he had picked up as a souvenir.1 source1 source

Sá Carneiro led the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and had been prime minister since 1980, at the head of the Aliança Democrática (AD), an alliance of the PSD, the CDS and the PPM, the People's Monarchist Party. At the general election of 5 October 1980 the AD won 126 of the 250 seats in parliament, and the PSD, running alone in the Azores and Madeira, won 8 more.4 sources4 sources

Amaro da Costa, his defence minister, was a leader of the CDS. A friend, Júlio Castro Caldas, told the tenth inquiry that in late 1980 Amaro da Costa had talked to him about the unclear division of powers between the military chiefs and his ministry, and about how hard it was to get reliable information on Portugal's arms exports and the companies behind them. In November 1980 the military Council of the Revolution abolished a colonial-era armed forces fund by decree, and the government asked for the decree to be declared unconstitutional.3 sources3 sources

The presidential election of 7 December pitted the AD's candidate, Soares Carneiro, against the incumbent, General António Ramalho Eanes. Sá Carneiro raised the stakes himself. He had threatened to resign if Soares Carneiro lost, which The Christian Science Monitor called a subtle form of blackmail aimed at reluctant voters.2 sources2 sources

The trip itself had been decided some days earlier, according to Sá Carneiro's secretary, who told the tenth inquiry that he was first due to fly in another light aircraft and switched to the Cessna at Amaro da Costa's invitation. The Attorney General later recorded that the use of this aircraft for the two ministers was accepted only at about 12.20pm on the day and communicated after 4pm, to a small circle of people. The fourth inquiry drew the opposite lesson from a similar timetable: the eight hours or so between the booking at noon and take-off were, it argued, more than enough to sabotage the aircraft.3 sources3 sources

Besides the two ministers, the passengers were Sá Carneiro's partner, the Danish-born publisher Snu Abecassis, who had co-founded the Lisbon publishing house Dom Quixote in 1965; Amaro da Costa's wife, Maria Manuela Pires Amaro da Costa; and the prime minister's chief of staff, António Patrício Gouveia. The pilot was Jorge Albuquerque and the co-pilot Alfredo de Sousa.5 sources5 sources

Eight days after the crash, a government note of 12 December 1980 said there were no signs of any criminal act. The election had gone ahead in the meantime. On 7 December Eanes was re-elected with 3,262,520 votes, 56.44 per cent, against 2,325,481 for Soares Carneiro.2 sources2 sources

The technical inquiry, set up by the civil aviation authority (DGAC) on the night of the crash, reported in March 1981. It found that the accident could have been avoided if the standard flight preparation, inspection and checklists had been followed, and might have been avoided or made less severe had the whole runway been used. It listed the pilot's mental strain, the hurried departure and fatigue as contributing factors.1 source1 source

Two loose ends were in the report itself. The commission said it could not exclude that fuel had disappeared from the left wing. It had found no sign of sabotage, but said only a deeper investigation, outside its remit, could judge whether sabotage was feasible. The criminal police reported in October 1981 that they had found no evidence of a crime, but recommended keeping the file open pending better evidence.1 source1 source

The Attorney General went further against the pilot. In an order of 12 October 1981 he listed faults he said Albuquerque knew about, from an inoperative wing tank to an engine that leaked oil, and wrote that the pilot would have been charged with manslaughter had he lived. In the same order he admitted doubt and opened what he called a public inquiry, asking anyone with information to come forward.1 source1 source

That phase brought in a team from the US National Transportation Safety Board, the exhumation of the pilots' bodies at their families' request, and two British experts hired by the broadcaster RTP to look for signs of an explosion. In 1983 the Attorney General suspended the criminal investigation pending new evidence.2 sources2 sources

Between 1982 and 2015 the Assembleia da República set up ten commissions of inquiry into Camarate. Their names tracked the argument: the early ones examined the “accident” of Camarate, later ones the “disaster” and the last three the “tragedy”. José Ribeiro e Castro, the CDS deputy who wrote the ninth report, argued in 2022 that the number misleads, because several were cut short when parliament was dissolved. Only the fourth, fifth, sixth and tenth worked without abrupt interruption, and the seventh produced no report at all.2 sources2 sources

The first, set up in November 1982, was given a narrow task: to judge whether the government and public bodies had investigated with diligence. It did not rule on the cause. It did find what it called deficiencies, irregularities, omissions and contradictions, and accused the criminal police of negligence, including failing to question promptly the firemen who reached the wreck first and failing to test the accounts of eyewitnesses who said the plane was already burning before it hit anything against those of witnesses who did not.1 source1 source

The second ran out of time when parliament was dissolved in July 1985. The third, reporting in January 1987, concluded that it had found no evidence requiring a revision of the official findings. That verdict was contested inside the commission: the PSD members said their alternative position had been defeated, and two CDS deputies declared their personal conviction that it had been sabotage.2 sources2 sources

The fourth turned the official line round. Its report of May 1991 said the authorities had built an accident theory without a plausible technical basis, and held as proven a fire in flight, a trail of burnt fragments released through a rupture in the fuselage and metal splinters in the pilot's feet. Traces of barium sulphate, it said, pointed to an explosive of the Sismogel or Gelatina type, and the whole amounted to sabotage and “an attack”. Only the PSD and CDS voted for it; the other parties abstained, and the Socialists said it went too far for a parliamentary commission to conclude that there had been an attack.1 source1 source

The fifth, in June 1995, rested on new laboratory work. Samples from a piece of wreckage known as fragment 7 showed nitroglycerine, dinitrotoluene and trinitrotoluene, and national and foreign laboratories found the deposits on it identical in composition to those on the aircraft's fuselage. Its facts were approved unanimously; its conclusion, a “presumption” that an explosive device had caused the crash, passed with the Communists abstaining. The Socialists, who voted for it, stressed that this was a rebuttable and provisional presumption, useful for parliamentary oversight and nothing more.1 source1 source

The sixth, in 1999, confirmed that presumption, reported more foreign bodies in Amaro da Costa's remains and urged that the case go to trial. The eighth, in December 2004, called a fire on board before the crash proven and adopted the finding of a panel of experts it had hired: that the plausible explanation lay not in accidental causes but in the explosion of a device. Two of the panel's experts sent in dissenting positions. The tenth, in 2015, put it flatly.3 sources3 sources

Much of the dispute turns on the same few pieces of evidence, read in opposite ways. Some witnesses described the aircraft in flames before it hit anything; others who followed its path said they saw no fire, and the third inquiry found nothing in the file to corroborate a fire on board.3 sources3 sources

Then there was a trail of burnt paper and fibreglass on the airport ground, under the flight path. A study by two professors of the Instituto Superior Técnico, commissioned by the third inquiry, found that release from the aircraft in flight was the only mechanism it examined that matched the trail. The third inquiry noted that every expert who had examined the wreck excluded a hole in the fuselage. For the fourth inquiry, the trail proved there had been one.3 sources3 sources

The splinters in the pilot's feet show how far the readings diverge. A British pathologist reported in November 1982 that they were aluminium residues from the aircraft's own structure. Later experts heard by the sixth inquiry said they were made of a material close to iron oxide, not the aircraft's aluminium alloy, which they found consistent with an explosion.2 sources2 sources

Fragment 7 is the main physical evidence for the bomb theory. The traces on it were found in 1995 by the criminal police's scientific laboratory and confirmed by Britain's Forensic Explosives Laboratory, which reported levels consistent with residue from a high explosive. The public prosecutor's office put them down to contamination; the sixth inquiry said it had heard testimony against that. On the other side, after the bodies were exhumed a second time in the reopened case, the forensic report found that there had probably not been an explosion on board, though it could not rule one out.3 sources3 sources

If it was an attack, nobody has established who the target was. RTP summarised three theories: Soares Carneiro, who had used the Cessna and been receiving threatening phone calls; Sá Carneiro himself; or Amaro da Costa, said to be looking into the Fundo de Defesa Militar do Ultramar. That fund, created in 1937 to pay for Portuguese forces overseas, was still in use in 1980.2 sources2 sources

The later inquiries followed the money. The eighth found that the fund had kept unrecorded movements and that Amaro da Costa had blocked arms sales to Indonesia, Guatemala and Argentina and, on 2 December 1980, asked for more information on arms sales to Iran, then under a trade embargo. The tenth confirmed arms shipments to Iran in 1980 and 1981, and found that the fund, though formally abolished, lived on as a private fund of the armed forces general staff until 1993. It also wrote that it had not been possible to establish a causal link between the fund and the crash.3 sources3 sources

Men who say they took part have offered their own versions. Three of them, José Esteves, Fernando Farinha Simões and Carlos Miranda, told the tenth inquiry of a plot involving foreign intelligence services. The commission found their accounts incoherent and unproven, useful at most for judging their own responsibility and not that of the people they named. The CIA formally denied that a man they named had worked for it, and German authorities found nothing in the Stasi archives.1 source1 source

The criminal case ran in the district of Loures under the old 1929 code of criminal procedure. Prosecutors closed it twice, in 1990 and 1991, after reading parliament's reports. In 1995, after the fifth inquiry, they reopened it, then decided on 10 November 1995 not to bring charges.2 sources2 sources

The victims' families brought a private prosecution against four people. Among them were José Esteves, who, the European Court of Human Rights noted, had apparently claimed to have blown up the aircraft, and a man the 1981 police report had cleared of suspicion. In 1996 a court declared the case time-barred for all but that second man, who according to the families was then detained in Brazil, which suspended the limitation period in his case. In April 1998 the judge declined to send the case to trial, saying the file pointed to an accident rather than a crime.3 sources3 sources

On 1 June 2000 the Lisbon Court of Appeal upheld that decision in an 803-page judgment. When the families tried to reopen the case with what they considered new evidence against him, the same court ruled in November 2005 that the proceedings were time-barred, and the Supreme Court confirmed that on 24 May 2006. No public prosecutor's charge was ever filed and the private charge was never accepted.2 sources2 sources

Five relatives of the victims took Portugal to the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that official delays had let the case lapse. In March 2011 the court ruled unanimously against them. It accepted that 25 years of proceedings might look excessive, but found them explained by the complexity of the case, with no substantial delays attributable to the authorities.1 source1 source

The Portuguese state has, in effect, given two answers. Parliament has said since 1991, in every inquiry that reported on the cause, that the crash was a criminal act or presumed to be one. The courts found no evidence of a crime, and the case expired without anyone being tried. The ninth inquiry noted that the state told the Strasbourg court it accepts and respects, within its own remit, the results of the successive inquiries.4 sources4 sources

Whichever answer is right, much is still unknown. If there was a bomb, nobody has shown who made it, who placed it, who paid or who the target was. The tenth inquiry could not link the military fund to the crash. Official correspondence on arms exports to Iran from 2 and 9 December 1980 and 22 January 1981, recorded in a register at the armed forces staff, has disappeared, and the inquiry asked the government to find out how.1 source1 source

The tenth inquiry also faulted the governments that followed, led first by Diogo Freitas do Amaral, deputy prime minister at the time of the crash, and then by Francisco Pinto Balsemão, for not acting on Amaro da Costa's concerns about the fund and the arms trade. It recommended that parliament put the whole Camarate archive online, and the reports of all the inquiries that produced one can now be read on parliament's website.3 sources3 sources