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Bruno Itan

An eyewitness who witnessed the results of a massive law enforcement action in the metropolitan area has described how community members came back with badly injured victims of those who had died.

The victims "continued arriving: 25, 30, 35, 40, 45...", the photographer stated. They included law enforcement personnel.

A particular victim was discovered headless - additional victims were "totally disfigured", he said. Many also had what he described as blade trauma.

In excess of 120 victims were fatally injured during Tuesday's raid against a criminal group - the deadliest such raid the municipality has seen.

The eyewitness explained that he was first alerted concerning the action Tuesday morning by community members from the Alemão area, who sent him messages telling him gunfire had erupted.

The reporter traveled to the healthcare center, where the casualties were arriving.

Itan explained that law enforcement prevented journalists from entering the affected area, where the police action was under way.

"Law enforcement personnel formed a line and said: 'Journalists doesn't get past here'."

Nevertheless, the eyewitness, who grew up in the area, stated he managed to make his way past the security perimeter, where he stayed through the night.

He reported that Tuesday night, area inhabitants commenced searching the mountainous area that borders the Penha neighborhood from the adjacent Alemão area for relatives who were unaccounted for after the operation.

Community members living in Penha arranged the recovered bodies in an open area - the documented evidence show the response of the people there.

"The violence of the situation impacted me deeply: the pain of relatives, women collapsing, women carrying children, weeping, furious relatives," the photographer recalled.

Bruno Itan

The governor of the region announced that the large-scale security action involving around 2,500 officers was intended to stopping a gang known as Red Command from increasing their control.

At first, the Rio state government claimed that sixty individuals along with four officers" were fatally injured in the operation.

Officials subsequently stated that their "preliminary" count suggests that 117 individuals were fatally injured.

Rio's public defender's office, that offers legal help to the poor, has calculated the final tally of people killed as 132.

Based on expert analysis, Red Command stands as the sole illegal faction that in the past few years has succeeded to increase its control in the state of Rio de Janeiro.

Experts commonly view one of the two largest gangs nationally, alongside a rival criminal group, featuring a timeline extending half a century.

According to correspondent an expert, who has been covering criminal activity in the city extensively, the gang "functions as a network" with neighborhood bosses joining the organization and acting as "operational allies".

The criminal group focuses mainly on illegal drug trade, but also smuggles guns, gold, fuel, liquor cigarettes.

Per law enforcement statements, gang members have substantial firearms and police said that while the action was underway, they encountered resistance via weaponized unmanned aircraft.

The governor of Rio state, Cláudio Castro, labeled gang affiliates as drug terrorists and described the law enforcement personnel fatally injured in the action as courageous individuals.

However, the count of people killed in the security action has come in for criticism with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights expressing they felt "appalled".

In a media appearance the next day, Governor Castro justified security actions.

"We did not plan to result in deaths. We intended to arrest them all alive," he declared.

He further explained that the circumstances had escalated as the individuals resisted aggressively: "It occurred of the counterattack they executed and the disproportionate use of force by the illegal group."

The governor further reported that the victims shown by residents in Penha had been "manipulated".

In a post on social media, he asserted that some of them had been taken of the camouflage clothing which he claimed they wore "to redirect responsibility toward law enforcement".

A law enforcement representative representing security forces additionally stated that "camouflage clothing, vests, and firearms" were stripped from the casualties and displayed evidence appearing to show an individual cutting camouflage clothing {off a corpse