Rio de Janeiro (AFP)
Police shot dead a man who detained about 30 passengers on a bus on Tuesday, a spokesman said four hours after the start of the hostage-taking on the huge bridge linking Rio de Janeiro to the neighboring city. Niteroi.
"It was necessary to shoot to neutralize this marginal and save the people on the bus," police spokesman Mauro Fliess told Globo television, adding: "he died on the bus".
His weapon was fake, he said.
Traffic on this 13-km-long bridge was almost paralyzed as thousands of people made their way to work.
"It's the police we love," said Colonel Fliess, with far-right President Jair Bolsonaro strongly against crime and saying "a good bandit is a dead bandit".
The officer pointed out that 31 people were being held hostage at the time of the denouement and not 16 as previously announced. "No hostages were injured" on the bus to Rio, he assured.
The police were negotiating with the stranger when gunshots sounded, causing applause and shouts of joy among the crowd of curious, armed with their smartphones.
The hostage-taking began around 05:30 (0830 GMT), when the unknown boarded the bus and threatened the passengers. He later released six of them - four women, two men - who were picked up by ambulances dispatched to the scene.
"He announced that the bus was hijacked and was very quiet," said Hans Moreno, one of the ex-hostages, on Globo TV. Another passenger, Walter Freire, explained that he thought he was going to "die".
- "Save the hostages" -
Many heavily armed police were present on the Niteroi Bridge, including snipers.
The motive and the demands of the unknown were unknown, a young man wearing a white t-shirt and dark trousers who briefly passed his head through one of the windows.
"Ideally, everyone should have come out alive but we had to make the decision to save the hostages," said Rio State Governor Wilson Witzel, who quickly visited the scene.
He said a member of the hostage's family "apologized to the whole society" for his actions.
© 2019 AFP