Wife of Greek ambassador to Brazil sentenced to 31 years for planning his murder

The wife of the late Greek ambassador to Brazil was sentenced to 31 years behind bars for being the “mastermind” behind his murder, a judge ruled.

Kyriakos Amiridis’ corpse was found over the 2016 Christmas holiday in a car that he and his wife had rented in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood on the outskirts of Rio, where the family was on vacation.

At the time, his wife, Françoise de Souza Oliveira, was having an affair with a military police officer, Sergio Gomes.

Gomes later confessed to killing Amiridis at his lover’s behest and was jailed for 22 years, the BBC reported. De Souza Oliveira was hit with a 31-year sentence.

Their trial lasted three days — ending on Friday — and Judge Anna Christina da Silveira Fernandes, of the 4th Criminal Court of Nova Iguacu, heard from 18 witnesses, Agence France-Presse reported.

“The crime was carefully thought out, premeditated [by De Souza Oliveira],” da Silveira Fernandes, said during the sentencing. “According to the testimony collected, the defendant planned and designed, being the mastermind behind the entire macabre plot.”

The judge said that “this family was torn apart” as a result of the murder.

Another man, Eduardo Moreira Tedeschi de Melo — one of Gomes’ relatives — was acquitted of murder but has already served one year of probation for helping to hide the body.

De Souza Oliveira previously admitted to Rio cops that she was cheating on the ambassador but that she had nothing to do with his murder.

“It’s not my fault if I couldn’t stop it,” she said, according to O Globo, a Rio daily.

Amiridis, who was 59 at the time of his death, served as Greece’s consul general in Rio from 2001 to 2004. He was the ambassador to Libya from 2012 until he took the top Brazil post the year he was killed.

Amiridis and de Souza Oliveira married in 2004 and the couple have a daughter, the BBC reported.

The area where Amiridis was found was teeming with off-duty or retired police and firefighters, who were believed to often extort residents in exchange for keeping drug gangs from infiltrating the neighborhood, Reuters reported at the time.