Amsterdam murder suspect caught with bag of meat at Lisbon Airport, fueling cannibal rumor
The Portuguese police arrested a 25-year-old man at Lisbon Airport who is wanted in the Netherlands for the murder of 21-year-old Alan Lopes in Amsterdam on Sunday, February 26. The suspect was arrested trying to leave Portugal with falsified documents on Monday. The police found bloody clothes and a “plastic bag containing several pieces of meat” on him, the Portuguese police said in a statement.
A spokesperson for the Dutch police told Parool that the meat found on the suspect had nothing to do with the Amsterdam crime. The 25-year-old Begoleã M. F. is “suspected of murder or manslaughter in the Netherlands, not of cannibalism,” the police spokesperson said.
The police found Lopes’ body in his home on Vegastraat in Amsterdam at around 9:20 p.m. on Sunday after calls from concerned friends. “It was clear that he died in a violent crime,” the police said in an initial statement. Specialists were deployed to the scene to do a forensic investigation.
Lopes’ friends told Parool that they called the police after F. messaged them to say that they had killed the young man. Several of Lopes’s friends received the voice notes at around 7:30 p.m. on Sunday. “He said that he tried to defend himself against Alan because he had pretended to be a cannibal. Other friends received the same vague message,” Marco Cunha (23) told Parool. Both the victim and suspect are of Brazilian descent.
Cunha immediately went to Lopes’ home but couldn’t find a way inside, so he called the police.
Lopes shared the home on Vegastraat with his mother, sister, and half-sister. His family was in Paris for the weekend, and Lopes had invited F. over to stay with him. According to Lopes’ friends, the young man was trying to help F., who worked as a delivery boy and got into drugs in recent months. “He went crazy in a short time,” Cunha said about F. “He was on drugs, and it drove him crazy. His brain just stopped working.”
“Alan tried to help him. He had a big heart, even for the one who killed him,” Lopes’ mother, Antonia Lima (45), said to Parool. Her partner, Freek Posthumus (60), said that the young man was building a life in the Netherlands. “He was busy with his driver’s license and worked hard. I am convinced he had a bright future ahead of him.”
F. is in custody in Portugal and will soon appear in court for arraignment. The Dutch authorities asked for his extradition.