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| NEWS > 25 August 2006 |
Other related articles:
Police suspended over bashing
A POLICE officer has been suspended and another removed from operational duties, on recommendations from NSW's internal police watchdog.
The actions are in addition to both officers facing charges, accused of bashing a man while arresting him for traffic offences and then trying to cover up the attack.
The police department said a senior constable had been suspended and an inspector had been removed from operational duties as a result of a Police Integrity Commission investigation.
Police would not name the officers, but the PIC has previously named Senior Co... Read more
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 Article sourced from
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Times Online - UK
25 August 2006
This article appeared in the above title/site.
To view it in its entirity click this link.
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543 years for death squad poli
IT WAS a killing spree that sent fear through a city already brutalised by daily bloodshed involving police and organised crime.
Twenty-nine people were murdered in Rio de Janeiro by a death squad of off-duty police officers, apparently in retaliation for a government drive against police corruption.
Hours before the carnage the police officers were seen drinking beer and singing karaoke songs in a local bar. Then they went on a rampage in a borrowed car, shooting men, women and children at random.
This week Carlos Jorge Carvalho, an officer who had pleaded not guilty, was convicted and sentenced to 543 years in prison for his role in the drive-by deaths in March 2005.
Known as the Baixada Fluminense Massacre, after the suburb where the shootings took place, it was the deadliest atrocity involving Rio’s notoriously violent and corrupt police force.
The sentence is a rare and speedy ruling in a country where rogue elements in the security forces often act with impunity, faced with an inefficient legal system and public indifference to what happens inside violent favelas, or slums.
Prosecutors believe that the massacre was carried out as a show of force by officers after the arrest of eight colleagues as part of an attempt to curb police corruption. The killings took place over two hours on the night of March 31 last year, when shots were first fired from a car into a bar in Rio’s poor northern suburbs, and ten people were killed, including three children.
Carvalho, 32, gave three contradictory accounts of where he was at the time, claiming he was looking after his sick father then saying he was visiting a former girlfriend, which he failed to mention at first because he is married. Witnesses placed him at the crime scenes. The blood of two victims and shell casings from the gun used were found in a car he borrowed on the night of the massacre. The jury convicted him unanimously.
The 543-year term is symbolic because, under Brazilian law, the maximum time a person can spend in prison is 30 years. Sentencing Carvalho, Elizabeth Louro, the judge, said that she was astonished that the accused was a military police officer “which, in principle, should inspire respect for the law and, in particular, human life.”
Families of the victims celebrated the verdict by letting off fireworks on the steps of the courthouse. Marcelo Muniz, the prosecutor, called the sentence a strong blow against impunity. “People have to start to believe that justice exists here,” he added.
Violence in Rio’s slums, mainly linked with the drugs trade, makes the city one of the most dangerous in the world. Poorly paid and badly trained police are frequently involved in gun battles with heavily armed teenage gang members.
Residents of the favelas have long claimed that the police treat everyone living there as bandidos and, rather than police the neighbourhoods, carry out military-style raids to quell gang fighting or to search for drugs or arms. Human rights groups claim that the authorities and the wider population turn a blind eye to summary executions by police officers of slum residents during these raids.
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