Rio de Janeiro Military Police, via YouTube A police edit of video recorded during a protest in Rio de Janeiro on July 22 compared the T-shirts of a masked man who threw a Molotov cocktail and a man identified as an undercover officer.Seeking to refute allegations that an undercover police officer had thrown a Molotov cocktail at a demonstration last week in Rio de Janeiro, sparking violent clashes, the city’s military police force released slow-motion video of the masked bomb-thrower, the newspaper O Globo reported Friday.
The police video, which included footage previously posted on YouTube and then mysteriously deleted from a government channel, showed the T-shirt of the man who hurled the explosive in more detail and close images of the tattooed wrist of an accomplice, who was seen lighting the fuse.
By comparing their own footage of the bomb-thrower to video of undercover officers recorded by witnesses, the police hoped to undercut a theory put forward by video bloggers sympathetic to the protesters, who have suggested that police infiltrators threw the bomb just to give the authorities a pretext for shutting down the protest last Monday near the governor’s palace in Rio.
The authorities were offered a helping hand by Brazilian bloggers who discovered that the photographer Ana Carolina Fernandes had posted an image on Facebook that offered a clear view of the pattern on one undercover officer’s shirt.
A screenshot from the Facebook page of the Brazilian photographer Ana Carolina Fernandes shows man who was later identified as an undercover police officer wearing a T-shirt and jeans during a protest in Rio last week.As a reader of The Lede in Brazil pointed out in a comment, one of the officers who infiltrated the demonstration by posing as a protester was wearing a familiar biker shirt, with the words “Last Stop Gasoline†printed on a red oval with a white star, above an image of a motorcycle and a woman in a bikini.
While the new version of the police video, and the Ms. Fernandes’s photograph, did appear to show that the bomb-thrower’s T-shirt was different from the one worn by the undercover officer, the same footage also seemed to prove that a protester who was arrested and charged with throwing the Molotov that night was not guilty.
As The Lede reported last week, a police spokeswoman in Rio said that a protester named Bruno Ferreira had been arrested and “accused of having thrown the Molotov cocktail that left two officers with burns on their bodies.†The police also claimed that Mr. Ferreira was in possession of more explosives when he was detained.
However, footage of Mr. Ferreira’s arrest, which was recorded from multiple angles by journalists and protesters, showed that he was not wearing a black T-shirt with a white design on it, but a green jacket with a zipper, and was not carrying anything at the time.
Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images A photograph of a protest in Rio de Janeiro on July 22 taken before clashes broke out, showed Bruno Ferreira, a protester who was arrested later, standing on a barricade with his arm raised.After his arrest, two video bloggers released annotated edits of the footage of Mr. Ferreira at the protest that seem to offer convincing proof that he was standing right at the front of the crowd when the Molotov was thrown over the barricades between protesters and the police on Rua Pinheiro Machado, away from the spot further back where the bomb-thrower was located.
While the first video blogger mistakenly asserted that the pattern on the bomb-thrower’s shirt was identical to the one worn by the undercover officer, the footage highlighted in the two edits does seem to suggest Mr. Ferreira was falsely arrested. (One of the bloggers also suggests that a black backpack worn by one of the undercover officers might have contained Molotov cocktails displayed for television cameras by the police later, but that remains conjecture.)
Since video evidence seems to clear both the undercover officer in the red-patterned shirt and Mr. Ferreira, that leaves the question of who did throw the Molotov unresolved. The police maintain that it was without doubt a protester, but protesters claim that there were other undercover officers in the crowd, one of whom might have thrown the bomb.
While conclusive proof has yet to emerge, there is evidence in another long video of the protest that shows most of the events unfold to suggest that there might have been at least one more undercover officer on the scene. At the 5-minute mark in this footage, just after the undercover officer in the black and red shirt tries and fails to tackle Mr. Ferreira, who is then shot with a stun gun and arrested, a bare-chested man in jeans can be seen speaking to him as if to a colleague.
In the footage that surfaced last week, both of the other men identified as undercover officers were eventually seen stripping off their shirts and walking bare-chested as they retreated back across police lines.
Video recorded that night by Tamara Menezes, a journalist with the Brazilian magazine Istoé, did show riot police officers inspecting a backpack with Molotov cocktails they said they found near a newsstand.
But a map of the location where Ms. Menezes recorded her video shows that the backpack was discovered on a street about 600 yards away from the protest on on Rua Pinheiro Machado where the bomb was thrown and Mr. Ferreira was arrested.
View Rio protest in a larger map
While protesters in Rio would like to know who threw the Molotov last week, they do have a more pressing question for police that they have been asking at demonstration after demonstration: “Where is Amarildo?â€
Observatório do Trabalho no Brasil, via Facebook In an image posted on Facebook, Amarildo de Souza’s daughter Milena held a sign asking where her father was. Her mother, Elisabeth, stood behind her near their home in Rocinha, one of Rio’s notorious favelas.As Vincent Bevins explained in The Los Angeles Times on Friday, Amarildo is Amarildo de Souza, a bricklayer and father of six from one of Rio’s notorious slums, “who disappeared after, residents say, military police took him away from the Rocinha favela on July 14.†Although the man’s family insist he is not a criminal, they told the Brazilian media the police took him away unexpectedly that Sunday night, and said later that he had been released. “Yet no one has heard from him since,†Mr. Bevins reported.
The case has become a focus of protests and online activism since the disappearance. In a YouTube video recorded at the protest in Rio last Monday before the violence, protester after protester tried to draw the attention of Pope Francis to the case, asking, “Where is Amarildo?â€
After a series of protests demanding answers, Rio’s governor, Sérgio Cabral, who oversees the military police, met with Amarildo’s family late last week. After the meeting, the governor posted a message on Twitter promising to “mobilize the entire government to discover where Amarildo is and to identify those responsible for his disappearance.â€
As the journalist Kety Shapazian reported on Twitter, despite that promise, protesters were still demanding answers at a demonstration in Rio Sunday night.
Reporting was contributed by Taylor Barnes in Brazil.
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