The Brazilian justice granted house arrest on bail to one of the suspects of having participated in the murders of a British journalist and a Brazilian indigenist in the Amazon.
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Rubén da Silva Villar, known as Colombia, was released last Friday, according to local press reports, after a decision made three days earlier to which AFP had access on Monday.
Federal judge Fabiano Verli ruled that Villar, who had been imprisoned since July, could choose to pay 15,000 Brazilian reais -about 2,800 dollars- and await trial in an address in Manaus, capital of the state of Amazonas (north).
“The favored person is not a child and must strictly comply with the conditions for this legal favor”decided Verli, who also determined that the accused must appear before the Manaus justice every month and will be monitored by means of an electronic anklet.
British journalist Dom Phillips, 57, and indigenist Bruno Pereira, 41, were shot dead on June 5 in the Javari Valley, a jungle region near the Brazilian border with Peru and Colombia, where registered an increase in illegal fishing, logging, mining and drug trafficking.
(Also read: The leaks that have three armies in the region in check)
Pereira had been working to stop illegal fishing in the Javari Valley indigenous reserve, a territory larger than Austria, with the largest concentration of uncontacted tribes on Earth.
Philips, freelance journalist who contributed to The Guardian, The New York Times and other newspapers, I was traveling with him to write a book called “How to save the Amazon”.
Native leaders cooperating with Pereira accuse Colombia of ordering the expert’s death for having organized indigenous patrols that seized lucrative cargoes of illegal fishing.
Police have said Villar, a suspected drug trafficker, led a group “responsible for selling large amounts of fish for export to neighboring countries.”
With the benefit of house arrest, Villar will not be able to leave the country and had to hand over his passport.
AFP
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