Heavy casualties in police operation against Rio gang
At least 121 people were killed in the deadliest police operation against drug gangs in Brazilian history, authorities said Wednesday, as residents of Rio de Janeiro lined a street littered with dozens of bodies found overnight.
State police said the raids targeting a major drug ring were extensively planned for more than two months and were designed to drive suspects to a wooded hill where a special operations unit lay in wait.
“The increased lethality of the operation was expected but not desired,” Rio state security chief Victor Santos said at a news conference. He also promised an investigation into police “misconduct”.
Rio police have so far confirmed the deaths of 121 people, including four police officers. The final number will rise to at least 132, public defenders said. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said the scourge of drug violence must be confronted and called for coordinated work targeting gangs without putting police and innocent families at risk.
“We cannot accept that organized crime continues to destroy families, oppress residents, and spread drugs and violence across cities,” he said in a post on X.
Residents of the Penha neighborhood in Rio collected dozens of bodies from the surrounding forest overnight and lined up more than 70 corpses in the middle of a main street.
“I just want to get my son out of here and bury him,” said Taua Brito, the mother of one of those killed, as she was surrounded by weeping mourners and onlookers on either side of the long row of bodies, some covered with sheets or bags.
A motorcycle caravan set out from the neighborhood in the afternoon to protest police brutality in front of the governor’s palace, where demonstrators gathered waving Brazilian flags with red palm signs.
Before Tuesday, the city’s deadliest police drug raid took place in 2021, when 28 people were killed in the Jacarezinho neighborhood.
The latest raids were also Brazil’s deadliest police operation ever. In 1992, 111 inmates died when Sao Paulo police raided Carandiru Prison to suppress a riot.
UN officials and security experts criticized the military-style operation’s heavy casualties. The United Nations human rights office said the killings added to a trend of highly lethal police raids in Brazil’s marginalized communities.
