Hostage killed in bank heist

MORE than 20 armed robbers stormed a bank in a small Brazilian town yesterday, taking hostages, exchanging gunfire with police in the streets and killing one person before fleeing in a convoy of vehicles.

The attack, in the early hours of the morning in the northern river port of Cametá, was the second such heist in as many days in Brazil, marking an escalation in the scale, organisation and aggression of bank robberies.

Yesterday’s attack saw the group of men, armed with high-calibre weapons, storm a Banco do Brasil bank, the Parastate security ministry said.

Images on social media showed a fire fight in the streets of the town.

The robbers killed one hostage during the heist, the ministry added, while another local resident was shot in the leg and is in a stable condition in hospital. “We pray to God to comfort the family of the young man who lost his life,” Cametá mayor Waldoli Valente wrote on Facebook.

The security ministry said it had found one abandoned getaway vehicle outside the town with explosives inside. The town was now calm, it added, with police reinforcements arriving by plane and boat. It was not clear how many hostages had been taken or if they were all freed. Authorities also did not say how much money was stolen from the bank.

The Cametá attack came a day after a similar heist in the southern city of Criciúma. Bank robbers there blasted explosives and fired high-calibre weapons at police, in a heist that injured two people and left cash in the streets to be pocketed by locals.

Murders in Brazil had fallen sharply since President Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019, but have started to rise again.

There were 32 298 murders in the first nine months of this year, up 4% from the same period last year, according to a tally by news website G1.