By Miguel Pereira
GUARDA, Portugal, March 26 (Reuters) – A 41-year-old French former policeman will appear in court in Portugal on Thursday accused of kidnapping and the murder of his current and former partners after police found the women’s bodies buried in remote countryside in the country’s north, authorities said.
The man, named by a police source as Cedric Prizzon from France’s southern Aveyron region, was stopped by traffic police near Meda, northeastern Portugal, on Tuesday when he presented apparently forged documents, Portugal’s National Republican Guard (GNR) police said in a statement.
The police source said he was accompanied by two children, aged around 12 years old and under two, and is thought to have recently driven to Portugal from France.
A vehicle search uncovered an unlicensed firearm and about 17,000 euros ($19,650) in cash, the Criminal Police (PJ) said in a separate statement.
Subsequent checks indicated the detainee had been flagged as a suspect in a kidnapping and double homicide case, the PJ said.
The bodies of two women, thought to be the man’s current and former partners, were found by investigators buried in a remote area on Wednesday morning, the PJ said.
Prizzon will appear before a judge at the Vila Nova de Foz Coa Court in the city of Guarda in northern Portugal.
Nicolas Rigot-Muller, a prosecutor in Rodez in southern France, said in an email to reporters on Sunday that an investigation had been opened into a suspected kidnapping and unlawful confinement of a woman and her 13-year-old son who disappeared from their home in Vailhourles in the Aveyron region on March 19. The suspect was the woman’s former partner. His current partner was also missing, the prosecutor said.
On Thursday he declined to comment further, adding that he was no longer in charge of the investigation.
Portugal’s public prosecutor’s office did not immediately reply to Reuters’ request for comment.
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(Reporting by Miguel Pereira, Sergio Goncalves and David Latona, additional reporting by Makini Brice in Paris, Writing by David Latona; Editing by Aislinn Laing and Keith Weir)
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