Police in Brazil announced on Saturday the arrest of five more suspects in the murder of a British journalist and a Brazilian indigenous expert in the Amazon and accuses the nine people arrested so far of being involved in an illegal fishing net.
Federal police said the investigation into the murder of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira in June revealed “strong indications” that one of the four suspects already in custody, an alleged drug trafficker known as “Colombia,” was the “leader and promoter financier 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 in the Javari Valley, a jungle region near Brazil’s border with Peru and Colombia, where there has been an increase in illegal fishing, logging, mining and drug trafficking.
Pereira had been working to stop illegal fishing in the Javari Valley indigenous reserve, a territory larger than Austria that has the largest concentration of uncontacted tribes on Earth.
Phillips, a freelance journalist who contributed to The Guardian, The New York Times and other newspapers, was traveling with him doing research for a book he was writing called “How to Save the Amazon.”
Native leaders cooperating with Pereira accuse “Colombia” of ordering the expert’s death for having organized indigenous patrols that seized lucrative cargoes of illegal fishing.
Police said the alleged drug trafficker, whose real name is Rubén Darío da Silva Villar, a Colombian national, led a group “responsible for selling large amounts of fish for export to neighboring countries.”
Among the five new detainees are three relatives of the first person arrested in the case, local fisherman Amarildo “Pelado” Costa de Oliveira, who was allegedly helped to hide the bodies in the bush, the police said.
One was captured during the night at a party in the town of Atalaia do Norte. The others were detained in small nearby fishing communities.
The double murder fueled accusations against President Jair Bolsonaro of fomenting a growing anarchy in the Brazilian Amazon.
Deforestation has increased in the region since Bolsonaro took office in 2019 and promised to expand agribusiness in the world’s largest rainforest, key to combating climate change.
(YO)
Source: Eluniverso
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