Lionel Messi’s troublesome brother, Matias, who was found culpable of possessing an illegal firearm, has been sentenced to a two-and-a-half-year suspended prison term.
The footballer’s elder brother, received a two-and-a-half year prison sentence on Thursday August 16th but instead of going to jail, he will undertake community service. This was prior to being found with an illegal firearm in a blood-stained boat which he crashed in the Parana River.
Reports have it that Mattias who was initially held under preventive arrest and later released while he recovered from a fractured jaw and other injuries in the Santa Fe province of Argentina, was handed the soft community service option through a deal with investigating prosecutors.
It’s also pertinent to note that under Argentinian law, Mattias could have be sentenced to up to eight and a half years in prison if convicted, with the minimum prison sentence being about three and a half years.
Ignacio Carbone,the Counsel representing Mattias, had also initially insisted he checked himself into hospital after injuring himself when he hit a sandbank, and conjured up a conspiracy theory when he suggested the gun found on the boat could have been planted by cops.
This is not the first time Matias would be associated to a criminal case, as he has been linked with known criminals in the past,
In 2015, he was once held for 16 hours in a prison cell after officers found an unlicensed 22-caliber gun in his car. Prior to that, he was also arrested in 2008 for allegedly having a loaded gun in his belt.
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