RIO DE JANEIRO – Police in Brazil said they arrested five new suspects yesterday in the murder of a British journalist and Brazilian Indigenous expert in the Amazon, accusing all nine people detained so far of involvement in an illegal fishing ring.
Federal police said the ongoing investigation of the June killing of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira had uncovered “strong indications” that one of the four suspects already detained, an alleged drug trafficker known as “Colombia”, was the “leader and financial backer of an armed criminal group dedicated to illegal fishing in the Javari Valley region”.
Phillips, 57, and Pereira, 41, were shot dead on June 5 at the edge of the Javari Valley, a sprawling expanse of remote jungle on Brazil’s borders with Peru and Colombia that has seen a surge of illegal fishing, logging, mining and drug trafficking.
Pereira had been working to stop illegal fishing on the Javari Valley Indigenous reservation, a territory bigger than Austria that has the largest concentration of uncontacted tribes on earth.
Phillips, a freelance journalist for The Guardian, The New York Times and other leading newspapers, was traveling with him to research a book he was writing titled How to Save the Amazon.
Native leaders who worked with Pereira accuse “Colombia” of ordering him killed as payback for having organised Indigenous patrols that had seized lucrative hauls of illegally caught fish.
Police said the alleged drug trafficker – whose real name they gave as Ruben Dario da Silva Villar, a Colombian national – led a group “responsible for selling large amounts of fish for export to neighboring countries”.
The five new detainees include three relatives of the first man arrested in the case, local fisherman Amarildo “Pelado” Costa de Oliveira. The five are suspected of helping him hide the bodies in the bush, police said.
One was arrested overnight at a party in the town of Atalaia do Norte. The others were detained in small fishing communities nearby.
The double murder has fueled criticism of President Jair Bolsonaro over accusations he has encouraged growing lawlessness in the Brazilian Amazon.
Deforestation has surged in the region since Bolsonaro took office in 2019 vowing to expand economic development in the world’s biggest rainforest, a key resource in the race to curb climate change. – AFP, August 7, 2022
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