Brasil's president offers help to deal with police murders

Brazil's president offered federal help to the state of Sao Paulo to deal with a wave of violence there that has claimed the lives of almost 90 police officers this year, according to officials. President Dilma Rousseff's offer to Sao Paulo Governor Geraldo Alckmin came after the state's military police said two of their own were shot dead in the city's southern Heliopolis slum late Wednesday, bringing to 88 the total number of law enforcement personnel killed in the state this year. The figure is 57 percent higher than the sum slain over the course of last year. On Monday, 600 heavily-armed military police launched "Operation Saturation" in and around Paraisopolis, a southern city favela of 80,000 people, following scores of murders in the metropolitan area, including the apparent execution of police officers, over the past week. Authorities said the operation, which led to 17 arrests and the seizures of arms and drugs, was aimed at "choking off soaring drug trafficking" and reducing the number of robberies and thefts. Sao Paulo state's public security secretary Antonio Ferreira Pinto said an order to kill six military police in the state last May came from Paraisopolis and was believed to have unleashed the wave of deaths. Authorities have dismissed press reports that the crackdown was linked to an alleged undeclared war between the military police and a prison drug-trafficking gang known as PCC (First Command of the Capital). On Thursday, nearly 300 military officers launched another anti-crime operation in two other southern city districts. Rousseff and Alckmin, who spoke by phone Thursday, agreed to arrange a meeting on the matter early next week. In September, the number of murders in the Sao Paulo metropolitan area jumped to 144, up from 71 during the same month last year.