Three French nationals working with a nonprofit group that helps poor Brazilian children were stabbed to death on Tuesday in the organization's headquarters by assailants who apparently wanted to protect a Brazilian accountant accused of stealing money from the group. One of the victims was decapitated.
After hearing screams from the third floor office near Rio's Copacabana beach and calling police, a doorman at the building captured an accountant recently accused of bilking money from the group trying to flee with a safe, said police inspector Marcus Castro. Officers arrested two more suspects within hours.
Castro identified the victims as Delphine Douyere, 36, and Christian Doupes, 42, the directors of Terr'Ativa -- roughly translated as Active Earth -- and organization employee Jerome Faure, 38.
The accountant, Tarsio Wilson Ramires, said he went to the office with two others to scare the victims, but police believe they wanted to kill them so Ramires would not get into trouble with the law because of the alleged theft, Castro said.
Ramires, 25, was allowed into the building at about 7:30am along with the two accomplices because he told the doorman he knew them.
Masks
After arriving at the group's third floor offices, the three donned masks and put on surgical gloves, then called Faure to come downstairs from his 10th floor apartment in the same building, Castro said.
Faure was tied up in a chair, and may have been tortured, when the assailants decided to call Douyere and Doupes down from their 9th floor apartment, Castro said.
A struggle erupted after the couple arrived, and they were stabbed to death.
The assailants then decided to kill Faure, decapitating him and leaving pools of blood on the floor and blood spattered on the walls, Castro said.
An ID card
Officers found an ID card for Luis Gonzaga Goncalves de Oliveira, 27, at the scene, and arrested him at a hospital where he was seeking treatment for a knife wound.
A third suspect, Jose Michel Goncalves Cardoso, 25, was arrested later after he showed up for work in another part of the city.
Douyere had recently discovered that Ramires was stealing money from Terr'Ativa, confronted him about it, and the accountant had promised to return the money, Castro said.
Douyere and Doupes' two-year-old son, Max, was in their apartment with a nanny when the killings happened.
The attack was the latest grisly crime in a city that has been hit by successive waves of brutal killings over the last several months.
But most of the violence has been confined to Rio's vast shantytowns, and the killings of the French nationals happened in an upscale art deco building less than a block from the beach.
They couple used to live in a colonial neighborhood on one of Rio's steep hills, but had moved into the building where their office was located because they thought Copacabana was safer, said Nicholas Haber, a restaurant owner who knew Douyere and Doupes for five years.
Police lined up the suspects in front of reporters and photographers during a press conference, and they blamed each other for the killings.
Detectives will ask prosecutors to charge them all with murder, Castro said.
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