Underworld figures fixed the results of Rio de Janeiro's carnival parade this year, Brazilian police said. Press reports suggest that top criminals used bribes and a hitman to buy and intimidate members of the carnival jury.
The fixing allegations center on Anisio Abraao David, 69, the honorary president of the Beija-Flor (hummingbird) samba school, whose empire includes a penthouse apartment on Copacabana beach complete with a swimming pool with a hummingbird motif on the bottom.
Extracts from a federal police report said that "some individuals who worked as carnival jurors and refused to accept benefits from Anisio were threatened or had their relatives threatened with death if the Beija-Flor school did not win the 2007 carnival."
In February Beija-Flor was crowned carnival champion.
Claims that Rio's carnival procession was fixed emerged in April after the police cracked down on a gambling racket allegedly involving the payment of bribes to Brazilian judges.
During a raid on an apartment in northern Rio, agents found 4 million reals (US$2 million) hidden behind a fake wall.
Shortly after the crackdown, known as Operation Hurricane, a parliamentary inquiry was set up.
On Monday, as the allegations grew, the 40 carnival jurors were summoned to testify before the commission.
Over the last 25 years, the carnival parade, a huge competition in which dozens of samba schools vie for supremacy, has become a big industry, with the city's 13 top schools receiving six-figure sponsorship deals.
Exact figures are hard to come by, but media estimates put the cost of the spectacle at more than ?50 million (US$98 million) a year.
Many believe that the influx of so much money has opened the door to growing levels of corruption.
On the eve of this year's carnival the vice president of the Salgueiro samba school was murdered by a gunman using an AK-47 assault rifle. Last October, the president of the Estacio de Sa school was shot dead and bundled into a car boot.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS