Downward Angle Symbol A symbol in the form of an angle pointing downwards. A Serbian man was shot dead in front of his wife and child in Brazil, revealing his hidden killer past. Bettmann via Getty Images
- Last week in Brazil, a man was shot dead in front of his wife and child.
- It was only when authorities tried to identify the man that his secret past as a contract killer was revealed.
- Darko Gleiser evaded Interpol for a decade before his death. His murderer was not caught.
In a plot worthy of an action movie, it turns out that a man shot in front of his wife and young son last week was, after his death, a killer hiding from his deadly past.
Brazilian authorities say Darko Gleiser, who publicly used the name Dejon Kovac, had a past as a contract killer and evaded Interpol for a decade after he was arrested in 2014 following the murder of a man outside a prison gate from Montenegro following the Christmas Day killing escaped through a prison gate, Fox News reported.
He, in turn, was killed last week in front of his family in Brazil as they returned home from a bike ride.
CCTV footage showed a masked gunman approaching the trio and shooting Gleiser at close range, Fox reported. He was later pronounced dead at the hospital.
Authorities suspect that Gleiser's death had something to do with his criminal past, but his killer has not been caught.
A secret, deadly past
Gleiser met his wife via Fox in 2015 or 2016 after moving from Montenegro to Bosnia and finally to Brazil. The source reported that the woman claimed she knew nothing of his past, citing local news agency Folha de S.Paulo.
The family's neighbors told Folha de S. Paulo Gleiser was a family man who, although he didn't speak much Portuguese, often visited the local bakery and mingled with the other parents when he took his son to school. The outlet reported that he identified himself as a carpenter and claimed his family lived off money from a business he ran in Slovenia.
Gleiser's true identity was revealed after his death when it was revealed that the passport he was carrying actually belonged to a Slovenian citizen who lost the identification document in 2017.
“Investigations revealed that he was living here secretly and under a false Slovenian name,” Fox News Luiz Ricardo Lara Dias Jr., the lead official in the investigation, told reporters on Friday.
When Gleiser's stated identity turned out to be false, police began investigating his background and eventually found that the man's fingerprints matched a set provided by Montenegrin authorities in connection with a murder there, Folha de reported S. Paulo.
“It turned out that Dejon was Darko, who was even wanted by Interpol a decade ago,” Dias told Folha de S. Paulo.
Montenegrin authorities were seeking Gleiser on multiple murder charges and for possession of weapons and explosives, Fox reported.
Representatives from Interpol, the Embassy of the Republic of Serbia in Brazil and the civil police of the state of São Paulo did not immediately respond to Business Insider's requests for comment.