Rio de Janeiro:

A gunman who shot and wounded two people and took 17 passengers hostage Tuesday at the main bus station in Rio de Janeiro surrendered and freed his captives after negotiations, Brazilian police said.

“The hostage-taker surrendered, he was arrested, all the hostages were released, they are safe,” said Colonel Marco Andrade of the military police.

Earlier, police said agents from the elite Special Operations Battalion (BOPE) unit were “conducting negotiations on site” after “a man shot two people and took hostages on a bus at the Novo Rio bus station.”

The wounded were taken to hospital.

In total, 17 people were held, including children and elderly, Andrade told reporters outside the station. He said one person had been shot three times, while another had lesser injuries.

Police have not released the identity of the gunman or his motives.

– ‘Everyone is desperate’ –

Images broadcast by the Globonews channel showed chaos at the station in the center of Rio, where buses leave for all regions of Brazil, with police deployed around the area.

“A man drew a gun, started shooting and entered the bus. I have two friends on this bus, everyone is desperate, we don’t know what will happen,” a witness told the broadcaster.

Television footage showed a blue bus stopped in the middle of an empty parking lot.

The terminal was closed after all passengers and employees were evacuated, AFP witnessed.

In 2000, a hostage situation on a bus in a residential area of Rio left two people dead.

The incident kept the nation rapt as it was broadcast live on television for hours, and inspired the 2008 movie “Last Stop 174.”

In 2019, a hijacker armed with what turned out to be a fake gun was shot and killed by police in Rio after he held a busload of passengers hostage for several hours on a major bridge linking the city to the town of Niteroi.

Brazil’s most iconic city, Rio de Janeiro has long been plagued by high crime rates linked to poverty and inequality.

Rio’s sprawling favelas, which crowd the metropolitan area’s hillsides, often overlooking picture-postcard beaches and lush mountains, are the epicenter of gang and drug-related violence.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Brasilia:

The former heads of Brazil’s Army and Air Force have confirmed to federal police that ex-President Jair Bolsonaro discussed a draft decree to prevent the handover of power after the 2022 election, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Their testimonies, delivered to investigators in recent weeks, augur badly for Bolsonaro, whose political career looks finished and is now widely seen as battling to stay out of jail.

Bolsonaro has already been ruled politically ineligible until 2030 for spreading electoral misinformation during the 2022 campaign, and recently had his passport seized by police probing his efforts to cling onto power after he lost to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in the election.

Last week, former Army chief Marco Antonio Freire Gomes told police in a seven-hour deposition that there were discussions with Bolsonaro over a draft decree that could have prevented Lula’s inauguration, two sources said.

That followed testimony from former Air Force chief Carlos Baptista Junior, who last month also told police about the discussions with Bolsonaro on ways to prevent Lula taking power, one of the sources said.

Neither Gomes nor Baptista Junior could be reached for comment.

A spokesman for Bolsonaro, who has denied the allegations, calling them a politically motivated witch-hunt, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bolsonaro currently faces various criminal probes that are close to reaching their conclusions.

A federal police source with knowledge of the matter said investigators plan to combine the various probes, and are already discussing the charges they believe Bolsonaro should face. The possible charges, which include trying to overthrow the democratic state, racketeering, and falsification of documents, carry a maximum total jail sentence of 55 years.

Once the federal police have decided what charges they believe Bolsonaro should face, it would then be up to the office of Brazil’s prosecutor general to formally indict him.

“Bolsonaro’s indictment is more a matter of when, rather than if,” a source in the top prosecutor’s office told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Neither the prosecutor general’s office nor the federal police responded to requests for comment.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)