Brazil TV host accused of ordering killings to boost ratings
Police charge that the host of a Brazilian TV crime show was involved in organized **** trafficking and ordered killings to get rid of rivals and boost his ratings, the BBC reports.
Wallace Souza, a former police officer who is now a state legislator, says the charges are merely an attempt by rivals to smear him.
"I was the one who organized legislative inquiries into organized crime, the prison system, corruption, **** trafficking by police, and **********," Souza tells the Associated Press.
But the police say he ordered killings in the state of Amazonas and alerted TV crews to get them to the scene first.
His popular TV show, Canal Livre, was suspended last year as police stepped up their investigation. It featured Souza, in a studio, railing against rampant crime in the state, punctuated with often exclusive footage of arrests, crime scenes and **** seizures.
"We believe that they organized a kind of death squad to execute rivals who disputed with them the **** trafficking business," state police intelligence chief Thomaz Vasconcelos tells the AP. Souza, he charged, "would eliminate his rival and use the ******* as a news story for his program."
The authorities accuse him of ordering at least five *******.
Vasconcelos says the execution orders always came from Souza or his ***, who has also been charged, and that TV crews were alerted to get to the scene of the crime first.
"On several occasions they fabricated the facts, they fabricated news," says State Security Francisco Cavalcanti, according to the AP
