In interviews with community leaders, lawyers, security specialists and bereaved relatives, the Guardian pieces together how an operation targeting a criminal gang left 122 people dead last October
Warning: contains graphic images
Visual investigation: how Rio’s deadliest police raid unfolded
Juliana Conceição startled awake as the first shots of an infamous day were fired in the Complexo da Penha, the labyrinthine Rio favela where she was born and raised.
It was 4.30am on 28 October. Thousands of police had surrounded the community’sbarricaded entrancesand were preparing to swarm up its streets on foot and in black armoured personnel carriers with firing ports and bullet-cracked ballistic windows.
Clouds of smoke fouled the dawn air as drug traffickers torched tyres and cars and opened fire from above.
“It was like the shooting was inside our house … like we were in the middle of a war,” said Conceição, who sheltered indoors as her neighbourhood became a battleground.
By nightfall, the father of her six children, Ronaldo Julião da Silva, would lie dead in a nearby alley – one of 122 people killed in the deadliest police operation in Brazilian history. Five of the victims were police.
“It happened just down here,” Conceição said 10 days after the 17-hour raid, as she led the way down the passageway where her ex-husband was found, his skull and hand shredded by gunfire.
She carried a yellow certificate attributing Silva’s death – a day after his 46th birthday – to “cerebral and cardiac laceration [caused by] perforating blunt force”.
Source: Drudge Report
