Police Infiltrators Among Protesters
Police Infiltrators Among Protesters
By ROBERT MACKEY, SERGIO PEçANHA and TAYLOR BARNES AND NADIA SUSSMAN
Supporters of Brazil’s protest movement and the police in Rio de Janeiro spent much of Tuesday arguing online over which side was to blame for violence at a demonstration the night before, at the start of a papal visit.
While neither side was able to produce definitive proof of who instigated the clashes on Monday near the governor’s palace in Rio, shortly after Pope Francis left the area, an examination of video recorded by witnesses, protesters and the police did appear to show undercover officers — called infiltrators by the protesters and intelligence agents by the authorities — at work.
A central piece of evidence in the arguments presented by both sides was 40 seconds of video released by Rio’s military police that showed a man near the front line between the two sides lighting and then hurling a Molotov cocktail, which exploded with a loud bang near officers in riot gear.
Although the police provided the video to the newspaper O Globo, and issued an invitation to the public via Twitter to watch what the department described as images of the protester who started the confrontation by throwing a Molotov cocktail at officers, within hours the clip was mysteriously removed from YouTube.
Late Tuesday, the police uploaded a different video clip to YouTube that captured a loud bang at some stage in the clashes outside an Esso station on Rua Pinheiro Machado near the Guanabara Palace. But that video was recorded from so far behind police lines that it offered no view of the person who threw the explosive.
More:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/24/video-of-clashes-in-brazil-appears-to-show-police-infiltrators-among-the-protesters/?_r=0
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