Rio De Janeiro:
At least 25 folks have been killed in a shootout in between suspected drug traffickers and police in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday, one of the state’s deadliest police raids, police mentioned.
People targeted in the raid in the poor Jacarezinho neighborhood attempted to escape across rooftops as police arrived in armored automobiles and helicopters flew overhead, tv photos showed. The firefight forced residents to shelter in their houses.
The victims incorporated one police officer, and the remainder have been suspected members of the drug-trafficking gang that dominated life in the slum, such as some of its leaders, police mentioned.
It was the deadliest single police operation in 16 years for Rio state which has suffered for decades from drug-connected violence in its several favelas.
The bloodbath prompted criticism from human rights groups such as Amnesty International, who lambasted the police for the “reprehensible and unjustifiable” loss of life in a neighborhood mainly populated by Black and poor folks.
“The number of people killed in this police operation is reprehensible, as is the fact that, once again, this massacre took place in a favela,” mentioned Jurema Werneck, executive director of Amnesty International Brazil, referring to the informally organized neighborhood with couple of public services.
A 2005 raid in the Baixada Fluminense in Rio’s violent northern outskirts killed 29 folks.
“This is one of the largest death tolls in a police operation in Rio, surpassing 19 at Complexo do Alemao slum in 2007, except we did not lose one of ours then,” police chief Ronaldo Oliveira told Reuters.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) mentioned that Rio de Janeiro prosecutors have a constitutional obligation to oversee the police and pursue criminal investigations of police abuses. It known as for a thorough and independent investigation into the deaths.
According to HRW, Rio police killed 453 folks and at least 4 police officers died in police actions for the duration of the very first 3 months of the year, in spite of a Supreme Court ruling prohibiting operations in communities for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic except in “absolutely exceptional cases.”
Police mentioned in addition to drug trafficking, the gang robbed trucks of cargo and held up commuter trains to steal from passengers.
Police displayed an arsenal of seized weapons at a news conference: six assault rifles, 15 handguns, a machine gun, 14 grenades and a round of artillery ammunition.
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