Hostage-taker shot as Rio bus siege ends

June 12, 2000
Web posted at: 8:47 p.m. EDT (0047 GMT)

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (CNN) -- An attempted bus robbery in Rio de Janeiro on Monday turned into a hostage drama that lasted several hours, ending when a police sniper shot the suspect as he emerged from the bus with a hostage.

Brazilian police, who said the man was not dead, whisked him away after he was shot. No one else was injured.

Brazilian television aired live pictures Monday of a man who police said they surprised at 2 p.m. (3 p.m. EDT) as he was trying to rob passengers aboard a city bus in an upper-middle-class section in the southern part of the city. He was holding what appeared to be a small caliber pistol.

Once he was discovered, the man took the passengers hostage, letting many of them go until approximately four men and six women remained. He told police he wanted 1,000 reais, (about $600) and two grenades.

The man, who appeared to be in his late 20s or early 30s, made one young woman write on a bus window with lipstick that he had a pact with the devil, police said. A radio station broadcast an interview with a woman who said she recognized the hostage on television as her niece -- a 17-year-old returning from college.

The man then placed the student the floor of the bus and a shot was heard.

Other hostages began crying, one woman yelled out the windows that the student had been killed. But she turned out not to have been shot after all.

The man had yelled out a window that his parents were dead, he had nothing to lose and, if necessary, he would kill all the hostages at 6 p.m. (5 p.m. EDT). That deadline passed without any further shots being fired.

Instead, he moved to the back of the bus, where he surrounded himself with six other women in an apparent attempt to shield himself from police snipers. He held one woman by the hair and placed the pistol in her mouth.

It was not immediately clear what he had been planning to do when he left the bus with a hostage.

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CIA World Factbook -- Brazil

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