Brazil: Police open criminal probe and interview witnesses over disappearance of researcher and journalist
"Brazilian police launch criminal probe amid search for missing British journalist, expert", 07 June 2022
...Guilherme Torres, the head of the interior department of Amazonas state's civil police, told Reuters in an interview that police had opened a criminal investigation and interviewed four witnesses while also seeking to locate the journalist, freelancer Dom Phillips, and his companion Bruno Pereira, a former senior official with Brazil's Indigenous agency Funai.
Torres said Pereira had recently received a threatening letter from a local fisherman who police were trying to locate.
He said his colleagues had interviewed two fishermen as witnesses on Monday, with two more quizzed on Tuesday. The first two witnesses had not provided any useful information, and Torres had no details as yet about the second two interviews...
Representatives from the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley (UNIVAJA), which first announced the pair's disappearance, said Pereira and Phillips were with an indigenous patrol that was threatened by armed men on Saturday. The pair recorded the confrontation on a cell phone...
The disappearance of the two men, who both had years of experience working in the complex and inhospitable Amazon rainforest, sparked global concern from human rights groups, environmentalists, politicians and press freedom advocates...