Brazil police shoot dead eight in Rio favela: official

Pulse News Agency International by AFP 15:33 - 12 August 2024

The Mare favela in Rio de Janeiro is notorious for the heavy influence of drug traffickers -- here, a resident smokes crack beside the shell of a disused and burnt out car there

Brazilian police shot dead eight people in one of Rio de Janeiro's biggest slums on Monday, an official said, just days after figures showed a record number of killings by state officers in the first quarter.

"We confirm that eight suspects were killed in an operation in Mare," a police spokesman told AFP.

No other details about the operation in Mare -- a poor, densely populated swathe of the city in large part run by heavily-armed drug traffickers -- were immediately available.

The operation comes after the state Institute for Public Safety released figures on Friday showing 434 people were killed during "police intervention" in the first three months -- a 17.9 percent increase as compared with the same period in 2018.

That is the highest quarterly figure since record keeping of police-related killings began in 1998.