All-day shootout prompts panic near tourist hotspot of Copacabana.
Ricardo Moraes/Reuters
A gunfight between Brazilian police and drug traffickers in Rio de Janeiro on Monday left three people dead and five others wounded. Authorities said the battle dragged on all day in two Rio slums near the tourist hotspots of Copacabana and Ipanema after drug traffickers attacked police. Two suspects were killed and a third “fell off a cliff and died,” military police told AFP. The suspect who fell off the cliff was reportedly wearing a backpack with nearly 18 pounds of cocaine. The chaos prompted panic in the area, with some stores closing up and an entrance to a subway in Ipanema temporarily closed. The onslaught began Monday morning and went on well into the afternoon, with a military helicopter deployed and some locals reporting sounds of grenade blasts. It’s unclear whether the five people wounded were civilians or part of the drug gang. Rio de Janeiro is notorious for violence fueled by drug-trafficking gangs, and Monday’s attack was reportedly targeted at a special police unit set up to keep order in the drug-ridden slums.
