Residents of a Rio de Janeiro community lined up their dead in harrowing scenes on Wednesday after Brazil’s bloodiest police raid killed at least 119 people, spotlighting the city’s war against drug gangs.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva called for action against organized crime that does not endanger police or civilians.
Hundreds of police backed by helicopters, armored vehicles and drones on Tuesday entered two favelas that are strongholds of Comando Vermelho — the Red Command — a drug trafficking group.
Photo: EPA
The police and suspected gang members traded heavy gunfire as residents scrambled for cover.
While the operation unfolded, Comando Vermelho seized dozens of buses and used them to barricade main highways, and sent drones to attack the police with explosives, authorities said.
Families of the dead decried what they described as executions by police, while the state government hailed a successful operation against a criminal group that has taken over large swaths of Rio de Janeiro.
State authorities said the provisional death toll now stood at 119, including 115 suspected criminals and four police officers.
“We cannot accept that organized crime continues to destroy families, oppress residents, and spread drugs and violence throughout the cities,” Lula wrote on X. “We need coordinated work that strikes at the backbone of drug trafficking without putting innocent police officers, children, and families at risk.”
Lula sent Brazilian Minister of Justice Ricardo Lewandowski to Rio de Janeiro to meet with Rio de Janeiro Governor Claudio Castro to offer cooperation from the federal government.
Lewandowski told a news conference that he had offered to aid the state to “overcome this security crisis as quickly as possible.”
A day after the police operation paralyzed the city, residents of the Complexo da Penha favela recovered dozens of bodies from a forest on its outskirts, including one that was decapitated, journalists saw.
“They slit my son’s throat, cut his neck and hung the head from a tree like a trophy,” said Raquel Tomas, the mother of the 19-year-old who was found decapitated. “They executed my son without giving him a chance to defend himself. He was murdered.”
“Everyone deserves a second chance. During an operation, police should do their job, arrest suspects, but not execute them,” Tomas added.
Lawyer Albino Pereira Neto, who represents three families that lost relatives, told reporters that some of the bodies bore “burn marks” and that a number of those killed had been tied up.
Some were “murdered in cold blood,” Neto said.
The raid also drew alarm from abroad.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was “greatly concerned” by the number of casualties, his spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said it was “horrified” and called for “swift investigations.”
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