Celso Daniel

Celso Augusto Daniel (April 16, 1951 – January 2002) was the mayor in 2002 for the third time (72% of votes) of the city of Santo André in São Paulo, Brazil, as a representative of the Workers' Party (PT). He was kidnapped and assassinated in the same year.

A civil engineer who graduated in 1973 from the Engenharia Mauá School, in São Caetano do Sul, he followed an academic career and obtained a master's degree in Public Administration from the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV-SP) and a doctorate in Political Science from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUC-SP). He acted later as a teacher in both universities. As mayor he was connected to the United Nations Urban Management Programme.

Celso Daniel's murder has not been properly solved by the local authorities, and the conclusions obtained by the investigations are still under dispute; the criminals who kidnapped him have been arrested but theories about their motivation for the crime vary from suggestions that it was a botched kidnapping attempt caused by a misunderstanding of the mayor's identity to theories that the crime was politically motivated and the killers were actually paid by figures of Daniel's own political party, PT. Since the beginning of the investigation, seven witnesses have been found dead.

Celso Daniel was kidnapped on January 18, 2002 while leaving a restaurant late at night in the neighborhood of Jardins, in São Paulo. He left the restaurant in an armoured Pajero driven by his former body-guard Sérgio Gomes da Silva, nicknamed Sombra ("Shadow"). The car was followed by kidnappers in other cars, and near the number 393 of Rua Antônio Bezerra, in the neighborhood of Sacomã, the cars managed to block their path. Shots were fired against the tires and the glasses; Da Silva, who was the driver, said that at that moment the brakes and the transmission didn't work. According to him, the armed criminals opened the door of the car, grabbed the mayor and took him away, while he stayed in the area and remained unscathed.

...
Wikipedia