The authorities announced the discovery, on Friday June 10, of “apparently human-like organic matter” during research related to the disappearance of British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian anthropologist Bruno Pereira in a remote area of the Brazilian Amazon.
“Research teams have located in the river, near the port of Atalaia do Norte, organic matter apparently human” which will be subject to expertise, said in a press release, the federal police (PF), spokesperson for the research it is carrying out with the armed forces and local teams.
The PF did not say whether the organic material was found where firefighters were investigating traces of excavation, on the bank of the Itaquaí River in Amazonas state, where the two were traveling. men when they disappeared.
A man taken into custody
“We were told of a mound of earth, as if there had been an excavation on the spot, as if something had been buried, and mud was thrown over it”Fire 2nd Lieutenant Geonivan Maciel had told reporters. “We will probe deep to see if we find anything”.
“We cannot say that there is the slightest concrete trace”he continued, “but we will see if we find something that could make it possible to make a link with the two missing”.
After a very slow start, the Brazilian federal police and army have intensified the search for the two men, who were last seen on Sunday morning in the locality of Sao Gabriel, not far from their destination, Atalaia do Norte.
A 41-year-old man, qualified as ” suspicious “, was taken into custody and traces of blood on his boat were to be analyzed. Witnesses said they saw him speed past in a boat heading in the same direction as Dom Phillips, a regular contributor to The Guardian 57-year-old and 41-year-old indigenous peoples expert Bruno Pereira when they were last seen.
Brazilian government criticized
The two men were traveling together in the Javari Valley, a difficult area to access in the west of the Amazon, close to Peru and deemed dangerous with the presence of all kinds of traffickers. The PF had said on Wednesday that it did not rule out “no leads”including that of the homicide, in a region considered “dangerous”. According to local indigenous activists, Bruno Pereira was frequently threatened for his fight against encroachment on indigenous lands.
The government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has been criticized by relatives of the disappeared and indigenous groups for its delay in deploying searches. “From the first moment, our armed forces and the Federal Police were mobilized in the tireless search for these people”defended himself on Friday, Mr. Bolsonaro in his speech at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles.
This statement came just after that of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which had judged “extremely slow” Brasilia’s response to the disappearances and expressed concern about the disappearance of these two people, as well as the attacks on activists and journalists in Brazil.
Jair Bolsonaro had previously described the expedition as MM. Phillips and Pereira” adventure “. “In this region, we are generally escorted”he had dropped, Thursday.