Amazon fisherman held in hunt for missing British journalist

BRAZILIAN police searching for a missing British journalist and an indigenous expert in the Amazon jungle have arrested a man on a weapons charge.

However, police claim they have no evidence to tie him to the disappearance, the detainee’s lawyer said. Witnesses said they last saw Dom Phillips, who has written for The Guardian, The Washington Post and other publications, on Sunday along with Bruno Pereira, a former senior official with federal agency Funai.

They had been reporting in the Javari Valley, a remote jungle area home to the world’s largest number of uncontacted indigenous people, as well as cocaine-smuggling gangs, and illegal hunters and fishermen.

Brazil’s federal government dispatched navy, army and federal police to join a search for the pair in a vast reserve larger than Austria.

As a former Funai official stationed there, Mr Pereira had regularly clashed with fishermen plundering protected fishing stocks, and police said investigators were treating what they called “escalating” tensions as a key issue.

Civil police in Atalaia do Norte questioned several fishermen who were among the last people to see the pair alive. One of the fishermen, Amarildo da Costa, known locally as “Pelado”, arrived in the town for questioning on Tuesday in handcuffs as an empty shotgun casing and pellets were found in his home, according to a detective working on the case. He has been arrested and is awaiting a hearing for the weapons charge, said his lawyer, Ronaldo Caldas.

The detective, who asked for anonymity to discuss an ongoing case, said Da Costa lived near where the two men went missing. Da Costa’s lawyer said his client was not involved. Guilherme Torres, head of the interior department of Amazonas police, said that it was unclear if a crime had occurred, and that the two men could be lost. But he said Mr Pereira had recently received a threatening letter from a fisherman.