Portugal's Supreme Court of Justice (STJ) has rejected the final appeal of Ângelo Guterres, the man convicted of murdering Gurpreet Singh, a 24-year-old Indian national living in Portugal, in a 2023 shooting in Setúbal. The reasoning behind the ruling is what makes it notable: judges found that Guterres never knew, individually, who any of the men inside that house were. The only thing he knew with certainty about them was their nationality, and for Portugal's highest court, that was itself the clearest evidence of a racial motive. The victims were interchangeable to him except for being Indian.
The ruling, made public this week, upholds Guterres' 23-year prison sentence and closes off any further path to a reduced sentence, the STJ is the last domestic court of appeal in the Portuguese judicial system.
What happened in Setúbal
The case dates back to the night of November 5, 2023, in the Praias do Sado area of Setúbal. According to court findings, Guterres had an altercation earlier that evening at a café with a group of men of Indian origin, after alleging his mother had been harassed by Indian nationals days earlier. He resolved to retaliate, recruited his brother Fábio to bring a shotgun, and the two men, their faces covered, went to a house shared by six Indian nationals.
Guterres opened the window shutters of the room where Singh was preparing for bed, closed them again, and fired twice through the window, fatally wounding him. He then moved to the back of the house, where another resident, Major Singh Sandu, was attempting to flee, and fired at him as well, wounding him in the shoulder before Sandu managed to wrestle the shotgun away.
The original conviction, and what changed on appeal
In June 2024, the Tribunal de Setúbal convicted Ângelo Guterres of aggravated homicide, attempted homicide, and illegal possession of a firearm, sentencing him to 23 years. His brother Fábio received 13 years as an accomplice; the court did not find sufficient evidence that he knew of his brother's racist motive when he agreed to help. The Tribunal da Relação de Évora upheld the sentence on a first appeal.
Guterres then took his case to the STJ, arguing there was no direct evidence, no explicit statement or specific proof, that racial hatred drove the attack, and that the court had effectively double-counted his motive as both a "futile motive" and "racial hatred" as separate aggravating factors. His defense sought a reduced sentence of no more than 16 years, framing the shooting instead as an overreaction tied to his mother's alleged harassment.
The Supreme Court rejected that argument outright, reaffirming the finding described above as sufficient on its own to establish the racial motive.
A case that became a flashpoint
Singh's killing drew unusually sustained attention to the treatment of South Asian immigrant communities in Portugal, Bangladeshi, Nepali, Indian, and Pakistani nationals in particular, following a string of earlier incidents, including attacks on immigrants in Olhão in early 2023. Civil society groups organized open letters and public campaigns afterward, calling on Portuguese institutions to take racially motivated violence more seriously and warning that denial or institutional inertia only creates space for impunity.
The ruling comes as Portugal continues to debate immigration and integration following record immigration in recent years. Most of that political debate has centered on border policy and legal migration routes; this case became one of the country's most prominent criminal prosecutions involving violence against a South Asian immigrant.
With this week's STJ ruling now final, the case stands as one of the clearest instances of Portugal's highest court affirming a racial-hatred aggravating factor in a murder conviction, rather than allowing it to be minimized or negotiated down on appeal.
For foreign residents following the case, the outcome offers a data point on how seriously the Portuguese judicial system, up to its highest level, is willing to treat hate-motivated violence against immigrants, even as broader debates about xenophobia and integration continue.