Firemen carry bodies found in the woods of the Penha neighborhood a day after a massive anti-gang police operation took place at the Complexo da Penha and Alemao favelas on October 29, 2025 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photograph: Wagner Meier/Getty Images
The bodies of the dead men lay in a single row, on the pavement of a square on the fringes of Rio de Janeiro.
Many were stripped down to their underwear, residents said, so that relatives could more easily identify them. Others were draped by bedsheets, shielded from the crowds and the cameras of journalists and passersby.
Overnight, dozens of the corpses had been pulled out of a nearby wooded area, sharply raising the death toll of a large-scale police operation targeting drug gangs, and laying bare the sheer extent of the violence that had terrorised this low-income area just hours earlier and left many in Brazil stunned.
“More bodies kept coming,” said Rene Silva, a community leader from a neighbourhood where the raids unfolded, estimating that volunteers had retrieved 50 to 60 bodies overnight. “Mothers, wives, children were there, crying.”
On Wednesday, it was still unclear exactly how many people were killed in the deadliest crackdown on organised crime in Rio’s violent history of confrontations between the police and gangs.
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