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- A man was gunned down in Brazil last week in front of his wife and child.
- Only after authorities attempted to identify the man was his secret past as a hitman revealed.
- Darko Gleiser evaded Interpol for a decade before his death. His killer has not been caught.
In a plot twist fit for an action movie, a man who was shot and killed last week in front of his wife and toddler son was revealed after death to be a hitman hiding from his lethal past.
Brazilian authorities say Darko Gleiser, who publicly used the name Dejon Kovac, had a history as a contract killer and evaded Interpol for a decade after fleeing Montenegro in 2014 following the Christmas Day assassination of a man outside 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 approached the trio and shot Gleiser at point-blank range, Fox reported. He was later pronounced dead at the hospital.
Authorities suspect Gleiser's death has something to do with his criminal past, though his killer has not been caught.
A secret, deadly past
Per Fox, after moving from Montenegro to Bosnia and eventually to Brazil, Gleiser met his wife in 2015 or 2016. The outlet reported that the woman claimed she knew nothing of his past, citing local news outlet Folha de S.Paulo.
The family's neighbors told Folha de S.Paulo Gleiser was a family man who, despite not speaking much Portuguese, often visited the local bakery and mingled with other parents when he dropped his son off for school. The outlet reported he identified himself as a carpenter and claimed his family lived off money from a business he ran back in Slovenia.
Gleiser's true identity was revealed after his death when it was discovered the passport he carried with him actually belonged to a Slovenian citizen who lost the identification document in 2017.
"Investigations showed that he lived here clandestinely and under a false Slovenian name," Fox News reported Luiz Ricardo Lara Dias Jr., the lead officer on the investigation, told reporters Friday.
Upon discovering Gleiser's given identity was false, police began investigating his background, ultimately finding that the man's fingerprints matched a set provided by the Montenegro authorities in connection to a homicide there, Folha de S.Paulo reported.
"That's when it was discovered that Dejon was Darko, even wanted a decade ago by Interpol," Dias told Folha de S. Paulo.
Montenegrin authorities wanted Gleiser on multiple murder charges, and for the possession of weapons and explosives, Fox reported.
Representatives for 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 requests for comment from Business Insider.