Lisbon prosecutors open a Lajes probe as Rubio prepares to land

Portuguese prosecutors said on Saturday they had opened an inquiry into the legality of the government's decision to let the United States use Lajes Air Base, on Terceira in the Azores, during the war with Iran. The Prosecutor General's Office said the file began with a complaint from members of the Left Bloc. The foreign ministry declined to comment.

The legal hinge is an old distinction in the basing agreement. In peacetime Washington may use Lajes without a fresh Portuguese authorisation. Once hostilities have started, Portugal must approve. The Left Bloc asked prosecutors in April to investigate, calling the use of the base a gross violation of international law. Expresso reported that the complaint raises the crime of aggression, an offence written into Portuguese law in 2019. As far as public records show, it has not been investigated in Portugal before.

Foreign minister Paulo Rangel has said Portugal was not a party to the conflict and that the Lajes flights complied with international law. He has said approval came only after Washington gave assurances that any operation would be defensive, necessary and proportionate, and limited to military targets. Those three conditions are the government's defence. The prosecutors' job is to test whether the approval, and its timing, matched the agreement and the criminal statute.

Timing is the sharpest public fact in the file. Expresso reported that two American KC-46 tankers left Lajes on 27 February, and that five further KC-46 departures followed on 28 February. Lisbon issued its conditional authorisation at the end of that second day. If those departure times hold, tankers were already leaving before the written conditions existed. A tanker is a support aircraft, not a bomber. Under a hostilities clause, support can still be the act that requires consent.

Spain, next door, did not grant the same transit. That contrast has been part of the Lisbon argument since spring. Portugal is a NATO member and the Azores base is the mid-Atlantic stop for US aircraft crossing from the continental United States toward Europe and the Middle East. The 65th Air Base Wing is the American unit on the field. Allowing or refusing a tanker wave is a sovereign choice with an operational effect measured in hours of flight.

The inquiry lands in the week before a visit by US secretary of state Marco Rubio. Portugal Resident reported that Washington has described the Lisbon talks as covering defence, economic and technological cooperation. The prosecutors' announcement does not bind the visit. It does mean Rubio arrives with an open file on the base his department's military colleagues use. The Left Bloc's April complaint is now a live investigation, not a press release.

What the prosecutors have not said is who is a suspect. A crime-of-aggression theory, if that is the track Expresso describes, points at decision-makers who authorised the use of Portuguese territory, not at American crews. Rangel's public conditions, defensive, proportionate, military targets only, are the text a court would set beside the flight logs. The logs cited by Expresso start on 27 February. The authorisation, on the same account, arrives at the end of 28 February.

The next public step is either a prosecutorial decision to name targets of the inquiry or a government filing of the authorisation documents. Until then, the verified core is the opening of the probe, the Left Bloc as complainant, Rangel's three conditions, and a reported gap between the first KC-46 departures and the written approval.