Brazilian police have opened a criminal probe and interviewed at least four witnesses believed to be among the last to have seen a British journalist and an indigenous expert who went missing in a remote and lawless part of the Amazon jungle on Sunday.
Guilherme Torres, the head of the interior department of Amazonas state's civil police, told Reuters in an interview that police had opened a criminal investigation and interviewed four witnesses while also seeking to locate the journalist, freelancer Dom Phillips, and his companion Bruno Pereira, a former senior official with federal indigenous agency Funai.
“We are indeed working with the hypothesis that a crime might have occurred, but there is another, much larger possibility, that they're lost,” Torres said. “Now, our priority is to find them alive, especially in these first hours. In parallel, a criminal probe has been opened to see if there was some crime committed.”
The Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley , which first announced the pair's disappearance, criticised Brazil's security forces for taking so long to deploy search teams. Torres said he could not rule out that their disappearance was linked to the gangs operating in the lawless region that could have ambushed them.
In an emotional TV interview, Phillips' wife, Alessandra Sampaio, urged authorities to intensify their search efforts, “because we still have a little hope of finding them.”Pereira's family issued a statement calling for a robust search operation, adding that “we are also very hopeful that there was an accident with the boat and that they are waiting for help.”
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