Three military police officers have been arrested after a dying woman was dragged along a road by a police car that was meant to be taking her to hospital in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro, the military police service confirmed on Monday.
The woman, 38-year-old Cláudia da Silva Ferreira, had reportedly gone out to buy bread on Sunday morning when she was shot twice by what police described as “stray bullets” in gunfire between officers and drugs traffickers in an operation in the Morro da Congonha favela (slum) community in Madureira, in Rio's North Zone.
Officers then put the mother-of-four into the trunk of their police car to drive her to hospital and at some point during the journey to hospital, as amateur mobile phone footage testified, the trunk opened and she was dragged along the road for approximately 250 metres.
Shocked onlookers said the police were only alerted to what was happening by pedestrians and drivers when the car pulled up at traffic signals.
Health officials say Ferreira was pronounced dead upon arrival at hospital.
A police spokesperson said Ferreira should have been in the back seat alongside an officer and that the case was already being investigated internally by the military police: “This type of conduct did not fit with the principal values of the corporation – which are the preservation of life and human dignity,” the spokesperson told reporters.
The investigation will also seek to establish whether Ferreira had been shot by police or traffickers in the anti-trafficking operation.
But local people took to the streets on Monday to protest the woman's death, bringing a major local road to a halt as protesters burned piles of trash and accused the military police of killing favela residents indiscriminately.
-''Treated like an animal''
Ferreira, who took care of four relatives as well as raising four of her own children, was buried on Monday afternoon at a local cemetery.
“They [the police] treated her like an animal. Not even the worst trafficker in the world would have been treated like that,” Ferreira's husband, 41-year-old security guard Alexandre da Silva was quoted by Brazilian daily Folha de S.Paulo as saying at the funeral service.
Silva said he believed his wife would have survived the gunshot wounds if she had not subsequently been dragged behind the police car.
Tensions have been running higher than usual in a number of favelas in Rio after new communities were 'pacified' – forcibly brought under police control – and previously-pacified areas reinforced by tactical squadrons after an increase in the number of attacks against police, including the notorious North Zone swathe of favelas known as the Complexo do Alemão.
Indeed an officer at one of the city's Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora (UPPs) – police units installed inside newly-pacified favelas – was killed last week after criminals attacked the station in Vila Cruzeiro, part of the Complexo da Penha group of favela communities.
Adding to the tension is an ongoing investigation into the alleged torture and murder of Rio bricklayer Amarildo Dias da Souza who disappeared in 2013. Local UPP police officers are the main suspects and proceedings against them have begun.
In 2008 Rio policymakers set out plans to 'pacify' forty favela communities and install UPPs. Last week saw the installation of Rio's 38th UPP, in Vila Kennedy in the west of the city.
The policy of pacification has been largely praised by the wider community, but there remains significant distrust between favela community residents – which make up around 22 percent of Rio's population – and military police.
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