Federal police in Brazil have formally charged the alleged mastermind of the murders of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira in the Amazon, accusing him of arming and funding the criminal group responsible for the crime as well as plotting to hide the victims’ bodies.
In a statement released on Monday morning, police in the Amazon city of Manaus announced they had concluded the two-year investigation into the shootings of the British journalist and the Brazilian Indigenous expert in June 2022.
Police said their final report identified nine people who had played some role in killings that drew attention to the criminal assault on the world’s largest tropical rainforest and the Indigenous communities that call that region home.
Those alleged culprits included the main architect of the murders who police claimed “provided the rounds for the crime to be carried out, offered financial support to the criminal organisation’s activities, and was involved in coordinating the concealment of the corpses of the victims”.
The statement did not name the alleged mastermind but multiple Brazilian press reports identified him as Ruben Dario da Silva Villar, an alleged illegal fishing and poaching boss from the border region where Phillips and Pereira were ambushed and shot.
Silva Villar, whose nickname is Colombia, is in custody having been arrested in late 2022 for a different offence. He has denied involvement in the murders.
Until September, three fishers had been due to stand trial by jury next year for carrying out the murders along the Amazon’s Itaquaí River: Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira, Jefferson da Silva Lima and Oseney da Costa de Oliveira. However, appeal judges ruled that only the first two should face trial given what they called a lack of evidence about Oseney’s involvement.
On Monday the federal police said their inquiries had “confirmed that the murders took place as a result of the monitoring activities carried out by Bruno Pereira” in the area around the Javari valley Indigenous territory. At the time of his murder, Pereira, a former government official from the Indigenous agency Funai, had been working with an Indigenous association called Univaja to help its activists defend their lands from illegal fishing and mining gangs.
The police statement contradicted claims from a prominent Amazon politician last week that the murders were the result of a personal squabble between Pereira and a fisher he had supposedly “humiliated” in front of his family.
During a hearing in the capital, Brasília, the senator Omar Aziz minimised widely held suspicions that drug trafficking and organised crime had played a role in the murders. Rather, Aziz claimed a river-dweller who was angry at Pereira had simply “waited for the right moment to take his revenge”.
Those comments sparked outrage among friends and relatives of the two victims. Speaking for both families, the Dom Phillips Institute – which was created earlier this year to honour the journalist’s legacy – criticised what it called Aziz’s “frivolous pronouncement”, which had no basis in fact and undermined the Brazilian state’s “arduous” efforts to solve the crime.
