PARTS of Sao Paulo resembled a war zone last night as one of Brazil’s top crime syndicates laid siege to police stations, pulverised patrol cars in the city and staged simultaneous insurrections in 24 of the country’s prisons.

The armed attacks, which claimed at least 30 lives, were organised by the notorious First Command of the Capital crime gang.

In the aftermath of the most violent criminal offensive in the history of Sao Paulo state, police cars riddled with bullets and shattered windscreens littered the roads. Local television stations showed police stations in ruins and pavements soaked in blood.

Police set up checkpoints in the impoverished Sapopemba district of Sao Paulo, stopping and searching vehicles for weapons.

The gang, known by its Portuguese initials as PCC, had been tipped off that prison authorities were planning to move

765 inmates in the Sao Paulo area to two maximum-security penitentiaries in more remote parts of the state.

Many of the PCC’s incarcerated leaders were among those being transferred, and some were heading for solitary cells in an effort to cut their ties to their comrades in the streets.

In Brazil’s heavily overcrowded prisons gang leaders run their own wings, they control the drugs trade and have mobile phones with which they remain in contact with gang leaders in other prisons and comrades outside on the street.

When they learnt of the plan, PCC members drove from one police station to the next in Brazil’s drug capital, spraying the buildings with machinegun fire and hurling grenades.

According to the public safety secretary, Saulo de Castro Abreu, by dawn yesterday the PCC had carried out 55 separate attacks on police stations, patrol cars and bars frequented by policemen.

“The police will not retreat from these attacks,” Abreu told a local television station. “They have struck at the spinal cord . . . of our security.”

At least 23 police officers, the girlfriend of one of them, a passer-by and five suspected gang members lay dead. Another 32 people, including 15 policemen and two bystanders, were wounded.

The attacks “were obviously the work of the PCC”, said Enio Lucciola, spokesman the Sao Paulo State Public Safety Department. “It is trying to undermine our authority and intimidate us and the population at large at a time when we have redoubled our efforts to destroy the organisation.” At least 16 suspects were arrested.

Abreu said police were targeted in central Sao Paulo and in the suburbs of Osasco, Guarulhos and Carapicuiba. Further out, police stations in the coastal cities of Cubatao and Guaruja — about 50 miles southeast of Sao Paulo — also came under fire.

Leaders of the PCC were about to be moved in an attempt to head off a co-ordinated rebellion planned for the weekend.

In the first stage of the uprising, inmates took 25 hostages in prisons in the cities of Iaras and Avare on Friday. The authorities said that another 22 jails were then engulfed in rioting, including prisons in the cities of Araraquara and Ribeirao Preto, but they had few details.

“Evidently these rebellions are occurring as a response from the criminals,” the secretary of penitentiary administration, Nagashi Furukawa, said. The prisoners had made no demands, he added.

Founded in 1993 by inmates of the Taubate penitentiary in Sao Paulo, the PCC lords over the drugs trade in Sao Paulo, and is heavily involved in arms trafficking, kidnappings and bank robberies. It also has a long track record of jail breaks and uprisings.

The PCC first demonstrated its power when, during a 10-day period in November 2003, its soldiers attacked more than 50 police stations with machineguns, home-made bombs, shotguns and pistols, killing three officers and injuring 12. Two suspected gang members were killed in those battles.

Police are convinced those attacks were masterminded by jailed PCC leaders trying to pressure authorities to improve prison conditions.

In February 2001, the PCC organized a prison uprising that spread to 28 other jails across Sao Paulo state and resulted in the death of 19 inmates.

Last night, as the prison authorities tried to restore order, Marcelo Daniel, a spokesman, said four uprisings had ended and that inmates in the other 20 prisons were holding some 100 hostages.

“As far as we can tell none of the hostages has been hurt or seriously threatened, which is why we are considering these uprisings as minor,” he said.

Some 40% of Brazil’s prison population of 140,000 are incarcerated in Sao Paulo state.

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