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Sat 2 Apr, 2005 01:11 am
Brazil death squad 'guns down 30'
Military police are suspected of being behind the killings.
A death squad has killed at least 30 people in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro, police say.
Several teenagers and a child were among those gunned down on Thursday night in towns in the districts of Queimados and Nova Iguacu.
Authorities say they are looking at the possible role of what they call rogue police, in a potential act of reprisal for recent arrests of eight officers.
Rights groups accuse police of carrying out a 1993 massacre in the state.
Twenty-one people were killed.
'Rain of gunfire'
Rio Public Security Secretary Marcelo Itagiba said he suspected the involvement of military police in Thursday's incident.
"The Security Secretariat is working with the hypothesis that this massacre was an act of reprisal for operation Navalha na Carne," he said.
Witnesses told reporters that the gunmen pulled up and opened fire, leaving victims no time to escape.
"It was very quick. I got up to my house and went down the hallway when I heard a rain of gunfire," Creuza Regina said.
In Nova Iguacu the attackers targeted a bar, in what Brazilian reports describe as a drive-by shooting.
Rio is one of the most violent cities in the world.
Rival drugs gangs are in control of many slum areas, known as favelas.
BBC SOURCE
New York Times:
of the justice system.
String of Street Shootings Kill 30, Including Youths, in Rio Suburb
By LARRY ROHTER
Published: April 2, 2005
RIO DE JANEIRO, April 1 - At least 30 people were killed in drive-by shootings in two gritty, working class suburbs late Thursday night and early Friday, in what the local authorities described as perhaps the worst blood bath in the history of this often violent metropolis.
At a news conference here on Friday, the secretary of public security for the state of Rio de Janeiro, Marcelo Itagiba, strongly hinted that the gunmen were military police officers angered by a recent campaign to crack down on police violence and corruption. Arrests of rogue officers may have incited others "who do not know how to use uniforms and badges" to take reprisals against the civilian population they are supposed to defend, he said.
"We have an operation to weed out bad cops," Mr. Itagiba added. "If this was the police, they will be the first ones to be exposed and unmasked, because they are not police officers, they are beasts."
Witnesses said the victims, who included a 7-year-old and some teenagers, were mowed down by four men in a white car. Some of the dead were shot as they stood outside a carwash while others were killed in front of a bar, at a plaza called Bible Square, running toward a highway for safety or as they were simply walking down the street on an unseasonably warm autumn night.
Earlier this week, two men in the same area, one a convicted drug dealer, were abducted from a bar and killed, with the head of one of them then being thrown over a wall into a police station. According to local news accounts, surveillance cameras showed eight men, seven in police uniforms, driving up to the station and dumping the bodies. On the basis of that information, eight military police officers were arrested on Wednesday.
Rights groups in Brazil and abroad have long criticized police forces here for their violent behavior, including dozens of summary executions. In recent years, accusations that the police offer protection to and take bribes from the drug gangs that control Rio's slums have also proliferated.
Until Thursday's mass killing, which local news organizations immediately began calling a "slaughter" and "massacre," the most notorious act of violence here had occurred in 1993. In that incident, 21 people were killed in a squatter slum, in what the authorities later said was retaliation for the killing of a group of police officers reportedly involved in drug trafficking there.
A few weeks before that, gunmen sprayed bullets at 45 street children who were sleeping outside a downtown church here, killing 8 of them. Military police officers were also accused of carrying out those killings, but three of the six charged were absolved by a jury more than a decade later.
The region where the shootings occurred, known as the Baixada Fluminense, is home to more than two million people and has a reputation for poverty and crime. During the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, military and police death squads operated with impunity there, killing thieves and other petty criminals, sometimes at the behest of storeowners or security companies frustrated by the slow pace
NYT SOURCE
MSNBC
MSNBC
Some background:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2247608.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/country_profiles/1227110.stm
B/M
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