The boat in which British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian expert Bruno Pereira were when they disappeared before being shot and killed in the Amazon was found on the evening of Sunday June 19, police said.
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“The boat will be subject to an expertise in the coming days to contribute to the complete elucidation of the facts.“, explained the Brazilian federal police in a press release. According to the civil police of the state of Amazonas (northwest), the boat was found underwater, “twenty meters deep, thirty meters from the shore, weighted with six bags of sand, to prevent it from floating“. With the small white boat covered in mud, authorities say they have found “an engine and four drums belonging to Bruno Pereira“. The location of the boat was indicated by Jeferson da Silva Lima, nicknamed “Pelado da Dinha“, the third suspect arrested on Saturday. The federal police explained in a press release that they had identified “five other people who allegedly took part in the concealment of the corpses“, who were found on Wednesday and identified in recent days.
A traffic zone
Tuesday evening, the first suspect arrested admitted to having buried the bodies of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira, who were killed by firearm according to the investigators. They had been seen for the last time on June 5, when they took a boat to Atalaia do Norte (north-west), in the Javari Valley, an area known to be dangerous where multiple drug trafficking, fishing or illegal gold mining. The police indicated that the elements available to them at this stage of the investigation suggested “that the killers acted alone, without a sponsor, without a criminal organization behind the murders“. A version contested by the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley (Univaja), whose members actively participated in the research.
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The Univaja announced in a statement on Monday that it had scheduled meetings in high places in Brasilia this week, in particular at the Supreme Court and the Constitution and Justice Commission of the Parliament, to “pressure the authorities to get the federal police to play their part in the investigationon the double murder. According to this organization, for which Bruno Pereira worked in recent years to help indigenous people monitor their territory against intrusions by gold miners or illegal fishermen, “a powerful criminal organization (…) planned the crime down to the smallest detail“. According to several experts, the illegal fishing of endangered species in the Javari Valley is, most often, under the control of drug traffickers who use the sale of fish to launder drug money.
SEE ALSO – Brazil: a suspect confesses to having buried the bodies of the two disappeared from the Amazon