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At least 18 people died yesterday during a wide-ranging police operation inside the overcrowded slums of the Brazilian metropolis Rio de Janeiro, military police said, in the latest clash in the country’s second-largest city.
Special forces of Rio de Janeiro’s civil and military police raided the Alemao area in pursuit of a criminal organization suspected of being involved in cargo theft, bank robberies and attacks on rival gangs, they claimed.
Police said the 18 dead were a police officer, 16 suspected gang members and an innocent woman.
400 officers, four helicopters and ten armored vehicles were involved in the operation.
But the large number of victims has again raised fears of abuses by the police.
“There are signals of serious violations of human rights as this is probably the operation with the highest number of victims in Rio de Janeiro,” the ombudsman authorities said.
Police in Rio regularly raid the city’s massive ‘favelas’ which have often left dozens of people dead in armed clashes with the authorities.
Angry residents screamed at the police for arbitrary actions, which for its part says that “there is no other way to conduct operations in favelas where criminals can hide in crowded and overcrowded buildings.”
After the attack, residents were seen taking injured people to hospital in their cars, as Gilberto Santiago Lopes, of the rights group Anacrim, said the police had refused to help.
“We sent them to the hospital in trucks, the police don’t try to arrest them but kill them, that’s why they don’t help them when they’re injured,” he said.
“We are afraid to live here,” said a manor in the area. “Where are we here, in Afghanistan? if they want war, they should send the army to Iraq”, added the resident.
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