Brazilian police shot dead eight people in one of Rio de Janeiro's biggest slums on Monday, an official said, just days after figures showed a record number of killings by state officers in the first quarter.
"We confirm that eight suspects were killed in an operation in Mare," a police spokesman told AFP.
No other details about the operation in Mare -- a poor, densely populated swathe of the city in large part run by heavily-armed drug traffickers -- were immediately available.
The operation comes after the state Institute for Public Safety released figures on Friday showing 434 people were killed during "police intervention" in the first three months -- a 17.9 per cent increase as compared with the same period in 2018.
That is the highest quarterly figure since record keeping of police-related killings began in 1998.
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