Police withhold names of victims

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — Police are under heavy criticism for not identifying the more than 100 people they killed in alleged confrontations with criminals during a series of gang attacks that terrorized São Paulo, South America's biggest city.

Human-rights groups suspect that many of the dead were executed and have accused the police and São Paulo state officials of using the violence to hide the executions. On Monday, Brazil's Public Ministry, a federal watchdog agency, ordered the police to release within 72 hours the names of the 107 people killed. Police also must release the incident report of each killing.

State police officials, who had said they were trying to protect the privacy of the families of the dead gang members, refused to comment Monday, saying they hadn't received the ministry's order.

"There is a lot of evidence showing the police did kill innocent people," said Ariel de Castro Alves, the director of the Brazilian nonprofit group National Movement of Human Rights. "Every day we're reading about people killed as they were returning from school or from work. The police are constitutionally required to reveal these names."

Forty-one police officers died in the violence, which began May 12 when members of the powerful First Capital Command (PCC) gang attacked off-duty police officers, burned public buses and launched prison riots across the 20 million-person megalopolis and into four Brazilian states.

The violence was a bloody protest against government plans to move gang leaders to a high-security prison, information that was leaked to gang leaders. The usually bustling city took on the feel of a ghost town as terrified residents stayed indoors.

Although the attacks had largely stopped by last Tuesday, police officials continued to report well into last week that dozens of gang members were dying in violent confrontations with police.

On Sunday, the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo reported that city coroners had received the bodies of 272 victims of firearms deaths during the five-day crime wave, almost twice the number reported by police. Overwhelmed coroners also had been burying bodies without identifying them.

In newspaper interviews, the relatives of several people killed by police denied that their loved ones were involved in gang activity.

Such reports raised suspicions that the police were taking advantage of the emergency to wage vigilante justice and attempting to hide their misdeeds.

Such accusations strike a nerve in Brazil, where underpaid police are notorious for committing extrajudicial killings in their fight against hyperviolent drug gangs, which control whole neighborhoods in Brazil's big cities.

In March 2005, military police went on a rampage in a poor Rio de Janeiro neighborhood and killed 29 innocent bystanders, apparently to protest plans to root out corruption from their ranks.

The human-rights organization Amnesty International estimated that 915 people in São Paulo and 1,195 in Rio de Janeiro were killed by police in 2003 in incidents the police labeled "resistance followed by death."

Although that number fell by two-thirds last year in São Paulo, the problem remains grave, said Tim Cahill, the Brazil researcher for the human-rights group, which is investigating the killings.

"It's an extraordinarily worrying situation, this apparent overreaction of police," Cahill said. "There's historically been a pattern of excess by police in São Paulo, of intrusive and abusive behavior."

Pedro Gilberti, a São Paulo state assistant public defender, said his office hadn't seen evidence of any wrongdoing but intended to investigate the circumstances of last week's deaths.

"We want to find out how these people died and where and when they died," Gilberti said. "What happened last week was terrible, but we cannot let what happened justify police abuses."