the last book I ever read (The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell, excerpt twelve)

from The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell by Alex Fernandes:

In the chaos of the day, the exact timeline of events is murky. There are conflicting reports on exactly when the population surged on the PIDE headquarters, and reports of gunfire throughout the day and of emergency cars driving wounded civilians away from the action in the mid-afternoon, likely the result of various failed popular incursions on the building, pushed away by the violent response. It’s generally accepted, however, that at around 20: 00, a group of around six hundred civilians from Terreiro do Paço congregate once again in front of number 20 António Maria Cardoso, baying for the heads of those inside, with shouts of ‘Assassins!’ and ‘Death to PIDE’. PIDE’s first response is to set loose an attack dog, which the crowd manages to scare off with sticks and rocks. Then, paving stones are prised from the ground, the mob putting their hands to anything they can hurl at the building, lashing out in hatred. And then–at around 20: 10–agents of the political police open fire from the upper windows and balconies, into the centre of the crowd, following a direct order from Fernando Silva Pais. The bullets meet bodies, dozens of them, as the civilians scatter and dive. They kill Fernando Carvalho Guesteira, seventeen years old, a waiter. They kill José James Hartley Barneto, thirty-eight, father of four, a clerk at the National Confectioners’ Guild. They kill João Guilherme Rego Arruda,* twenty, a second-year philosophy student. And they kill Fernando Luís Barreiros dos Reis, a 23-year-old off-duty soldier who happened to be taking a holiday in Lisbon on the day of the coup, and who, joining his voice with the civilians around him, becomes the first and only military death of 25 April. The hail of PIDE bullets doesn’t discriminate–the lucky ones are the men and women who dive behind parked cars or into alleys, taking grazes or even a few bullets in the back or even coming out unscathed altogether. In addition to the four dead, the PIDE bullets injure upwards of forty-five more–the vast majority in their late teens and early twenties.