RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – A Brazilian judge late on Monday ordered the arrest of a German diplomat charged with murdering his Belgian husband in Rio de Janeiro and asked Interpol to add his name to their wanted list amid reports he had left the country.
Consul Uwe Herbert Hahn had been on preemptive arrest since Aug. 7 following the death of his husband, Walter Biot, but was freed on Friday after a local court decided that prosecutors had missed the initial deadline to press charges against him.
After his release, Rio de Janeiro’s prosecutors’ office charged him with aggravated murder, leading Judge Gustavo Kalil to order Hahn to be again preemptively arrested.
However, multiple media reports said that by the time of Kalil’s decision, Hahn had flown out of Brazil and had arrived in Frankfurt early on Monday – a claim that the prosecutors’ office said it was still investigating.
Kalil ordered that Hahn’s name be added to the International Criminal Police Organization’s wanted list, and that the German and Belgian embassies be briefed about the case.
In a document on Monday, prosecutors said “the crime was committed with cruel means: severe beating to which the victim was subjected, causing intense and unnecessary suffering,” adding that Biot had been unable to defend himself due to the ingestion of alcohol and anxiety medication.
At the time of Biot’s death earlier this month, Hahn said he had fallen from their apartment in the Ipanema neighborhood after suffering a sudden illness.
But police arrested the German diplomat on suspicion of murder after their forensics investigations found bloodstains in the apartment and the autopsy of Biot’s body showed multiple wounds.
(Reporting by Rodrigo Viga Gaier; Writing by Gabriel Araujo; Editing by Steven Grattan and Bernadette Baum)
