Dozens of bandits seize Brazilian city and loot bank
Dozens of gunmen armed with assault rifles invaded a city in southern Brazil overnight Tuesday and took control of the streets as they assaulted a bank.
Video broadcast on the Globo television network showed hooded men dressed in black walking the streets of Criciuma in the state of Santa Catarina, and residents being held hostage during the takeover, which began around midnight and lasted almost two hours. Shots echoed across the city of some 220,000 people.
At least 30 assailants and 10 cars were involved in the well-planned operation, Anselmo Cruz, head of the state police’s robbery and kidnapping department, told a news conference, speaking alongside the governor and the mayor. They blocked access to the city — including with burning vehicles — to prevent police reinforcements from responding swiftly, and deployed explosives in the robbery.
The gunmen traded fire with officers in the city center and at a police station, Santa Catarina’s military police said on their official Twitter account.
Two people were wounded in the firefight: a security guard and a police officer, who was shot in the abdomen and remained hospitalized in serious condition Tuesday.
“It was an unprecedented action for the state. There was never anything with this scope, this violence,” Cruz said in a separate interview with Globo News. The television network quoted him as saying the robbers fired bullets with calibers capable of downing a helicopter.
Jose Damasio was driving home from work around 11:30 p.m. when he passed street sweepers and other city employees painting crosswalks. Damasio had no way of knowing they would soon be taken hostage.
“If I had been delayed 20 minutes, just a little later, I would’ve been screwed,” the 27-year-old Damasio told The Associated Press by phone. “I got home and 15 minutes later heard the shots.”
Images on Globo showed a bank vault with a squareshaped hole in it and a convoy of criminals’ vehicles as they made their escape. Bills were scattered across the ground in one area of the city, and newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported that police arrested several people who collected $150,000 worth of the notes.
Police located the attackers’ vehicles in a cornfield. Some of the cars’ interiors were stained with blood, indicating some of the gunmen had been hit by police bullets, the Santa Catarina police force said on its Twitter account.
State-run Bank of Brazil refused to say how much money was taken. It didn’t respond to an AP request for comments about media reports that the branch was a regional treasury.
The robbery resembled one in July in Botucatu in Sao Paulo state.There, around 30 armed men blew up a bank branch, took residents hostage and exchanged gunfire with police officers before making their getaway.
The similarity between the attacks indicated they might have been coordinated by one of Brazil’s powerful organized crime and drug trafficking rings, said Cassio Thyone, of the nonprofit Brazilian Forum on Public Safety.