POLICE in the Brazilian state of São Paulo summarily murdered scores of people in May during a wave of revenge killings for attacks by a criminal gang that left more than 40 police and prison officers dead.

This will be the conclusion of an investigation by an independent commission that is due to report next month on the violence that rocked the South American industrial and financial centre between May 12 and 20. The week’s events marked a new low in one of the world’s most violent societies, where the police have a history of carrying out revenge attacks for the killing of their comrades.

“Taken together, these killings constitute the biggest police massacre in modern Brazilian history,” said Lúcio França, of the Brazilian Order of Lawyers and a member of the commission.

The violence erupted when a prison gang known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Command of the Capital, or PCC after its Portuguese initials) attacked the forces of law and order in response to the state government’s policy of isolating its jailed leaders in maximum-security prisons.

The scale of the PCC’s offensive left in tatters the state’s “zero tolerance” crime policy, which was one of the main campaign planks of Geraldo Alckmin, who governed São Paulo until stepping down in May to run as the opposition candidate in the presidential election next weekend.

Senhor Alckmin offered criminals a choice between “prison and a box” when he took over as state governor in 2001, a popular policy with an electorate terrorised by some of the world’s highest crime rates.

There was a dramatic drop in the state murder rate but the PCC offensive revealed in the state the growing strength of organised crime and an outdated security apparatus able to respond only with retaliatory violence. When the PCC attacked in May the police were caught off guard, despite claims by superiors that they knew about the attacks in advance. But they quickly seized the offensive, officially killing more than 100 people in what they said were shoot-outs with suspects.

However, the commission’s report will say that many of the killings were summary killings. The commission is also examining evidence of police involvement in the numerous death squad-style killings that occurred during the week. The inquiry is still trying to identify cases involving victims of police violence, amid accusations that the state security apparatus tried to cover up the extent of the killings. Hundreds of deaths that occurred during the week are now part of the commission’s investigation.

“My evaluation is that the total could pass 300 deaths,” said Romeu Tuma Jr, who served for more than 25 years on the São Paulo police force, heading the São Paulo Interpol office, and who now serves as a deputy in the São Paulo legislative assembly.

The victims include suspected PCC gang members, others with criminal records but not linked with the PCC and those with no history of any criminal or gang activity. What all three groups have in common is that they were poor, mainly black and came from shantytowns or slums that have long suffered from police violence. Witnesses speak of police stopping young men in these neighbourhoods on the nights in question demanding to know if they had police records and searching them for prison tattoos in a hunt for potential victims.

The São Paulo state government has refused to co-operate with the inquiry. In response to questions by The Times, the Secretariat of Public Security, the state ministry responsible for the São Paulo police, said that there were apparently no excesses in police behaviour; that the police response “was proportional to the aggression inflicted on the security forces”; and that the results of police inquiries into all deaths at police hands would be passed on to the justice system.

But at the heart of the commission’s report will be the findings of an initial review of post-mortem examinations of 126 deaths by police by one of the leading pathologists in Brazil. Ricardo Molina said that up to 70 per cent of the post mortems that he examined — or 88 deaths — that had been classified by police as “resistance followed by death” showed signs of summary killings .

“The common factors in these cases are multiple bullet entry points close together, which indicates that the shots were fired from a close distance, a concentration of entry points around the head and vital organs, and bullets having been fired from a height downwards, which indicate that the victim was kneeling or lying down when shot,” Professor Molina said.

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