Casimiro Monteiro

Casimiro Emérito Rosa Teles Jordão Monteiro (28 December 1920 – 25 January 1993), also known as Agente Monteiro, was a Portuguese covert operations military intelligence officer and law enforcement officer during the Estado Novo regime. He carried out state-sanctioned bombings and assassinations in Portugal, Mozambique and Goa. His actions were mostly focused against members of independence movements that existed in the Portuguese colonial empire.

As a PIDE agent, Monteiro tortured Indians in Goa (e.g. Mohan Ranade, an Indian independence activist) who were demanding the union of Portuguese India territories with the recently independent India. Monteiro is believed to have carried out the high-profile assassinations of Humberto Delgado He lived in Portugal for some time before joining General Franco's army in the Spanish Civil War.

After the war, Monteiro moved to the United Kingdom, where he worked for a butcher whose daughter he married

PIDE agent After Goa's annexation by the Indian Army in 1961, Monteiro was recruited by the Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE), the Portuguese Secret Service. Initially, he participated in a campaign to organise an anti-Indian resistance among Goans code named Plan Gralha. PIDE agents used the Emissona Nacional, radio station which continued to broadcast after 1961, to broadcast stories of Goan non-cooperation with Indian authorities. Plans were made to sabotage port facilities at Mormugao and Bombay. In 1962, a bomb was planted at Vasco Municipal School in March 1962, and another at a different location in October. Casimiro was implicated in bomb blasts on June 20, 1964. The Portuguese government, in an official statement to the UN, later claimed that the attacks were acts of revolt against Indian rule.

In 1965, he assassinated General Humberto Delgado in Spain. General Delgado was the Opposition Leader against the Salazar government. Monteiro, who had shot Delgado and strangled his secretary, was found guilty by the Spanish courts and was sentenced to 19 years in absentia. Monteiro crossed into Tanzania, and using a parcel bomb assassinated Eduardo Mondlane, the founding leader of FRELIMO.