International News

RIO DE JANEIRO, (APP/AFP) – Police in Rio de Janeiro state, which hosts next month’s Olympics, killed at least 645 people last year and 8,000 over the last decade, a rights group said Thursday.
The toll includes dozens of execution-style killings in addition to the lethal violence used during standard police work in the state, the report from Human Rights Watch said.
The international rights group identified 64 cases in the last eight years in which Rio police allegedly tried to cover up extrajudicial killings of 116 people, including at least 24 minors.
“Killing criminals was a requirement from my superiors as a way of showing that we were performing well,” one of 30 police officers interviewed for Human Rights Watch’s study alleged.
The officer said he had been stationed in one of Rio’s most dangerous
neighborhoods where he took part in operations against heavily armed drug
traffickers. The strategy was to kill them as a way to reduce crime, he said.
The officer, who is still on the force, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
He was quoted as saying that some police would capture suspected drug
traffickers and kill them, sometimes to gain status as killers and to boost
their own extortion rackets.
They would sometimes plant weapons or drugs on the corpses and intimidate witnesses, the report said.
It cited prosecutors as saying that in 2011 police tortured and killed the 14-year-old son of a woman who witnessed an execution.
The pressure to play along makes honest policing difficult in Rio.
“Illegal executions by police colleagues turn an already dangerous job into something even more dangerous” and stoke anger against the authorities, the report said.