RIO DE JANEIRO — An American woman was raped by three men aboard a public
van in a six-hour abduction over the weekend that began in the seaside Rio
district of Copacabana, the police said.
The attackers pummeled the woman’s face and tied up her
male companion, a French citizen, then beat him with a metal bar as he
witnessed the harrowing assault. The couple were forced to use bank cards to
withdraw money from their accounts before the assailants finally freed them at
a bus station on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.
The assault stunned many in Brazil, especially as Rio
tries to promote itself as a city on the mend and prepares to host the 2014
World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games.
“Everyone should be shocked by this horrendous crime,”
said Aparecida Gonçalves, the head of Brazil’s national office for combating
violence against women. She said that reports of gang rape remained relatively
rare in Rio and other parts of Brazil, but that cases of rape on public
transportation including buses and subway cars remained a pressing issue in
some large cities.
Two men were arrested over the weekend, one of whom,
the police said, confessed to the rape of the 21-year-old woman. The police
said she had been in Brazil on a student visa. A third suspect was arrested on
Monday night.
In addition to setting off calls for better policing,
the assault led to comparisons in the Brazilian news media to recent episodes
in India, including the fatal beating and rape in December of a 23-year-old
student on a moving bus in New Delhi, and the gang rape of a Swiss tourist in
March in central India.
The number of female tourists to India has recently
fallen by more than 30 percent as fears over sex crimes in the country persist,
the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India said on Monday.
The assault on the American woman here, police
investigators said, began early Saturday, just after midnight, when the
attackers forced other passengers out of the van, which picks up passengers
along the street and can seat about a dozen people. The woman was raped by all three
men, who took turns driving the vehicle, the police said. “It was a gang rape,”
said Jayme da Costa Rosa Neto, a police official investigating the attack.
After the couple were freed about 6 a.m. Saturday and
left at a bus station, the woman was taken to two public hospitals, Miguel
Couto and Rocha Maia, for treatment including the administering of a cocktail
of drugs containing the morning-after pill, to prevent pregnancy, and other
medications to prevent sexually transmitted diseases.
The police said that the American victim had severe
swelling around her nose, and that her companion, 23, had been hit in the area
around one of his eyes. The woman left Brazil after registering the crime and
undergoing preliminary medical treatment, while her companion remained here,
where he is cooperating with the police, said Alexandre Braga, a senior police
investigator with Rio’s special police unit for crimes involving tourists.
The two men who were apprehended over the weekend were
arrested after investigators tracked purchases made with the victims’ credit
cards, which were stolen by the assailants, and examined images obtained from
security cameras at a filling station and convenience store where the men had
stopped to buy energy drinks and whiskey.
After news of the arrests was broadcast Sunday night on
Fantástico, a widely viewed news program on the Globo television network, other
people here came forward to tell the police that they recognized the assailants
in connection with other crimes, largely robberies, aboard what appeared to be
the same transport van. One 21-year-old Brazilian student said she had
similarly been held for an hour and raped by the same men on March 23, after
boarding the van.
The revelation of that previous episode seemed to have
shaken the public security forces here. The victim had quickly registered the
case with the police, but the authorities were said to have slowly investigated
the claim. Two police officials in charge of investigating the March 23 case
were abruptly removed from their posts on Monday.
Brazil has recently grappled with other high-profile
cases of gang rape, including one episode in 2012
in Queimadas, a city in the northeast Paraíba State, in which six men were
convicted of raping five women at a birthday party. Two of the women were
killed after recognizing their attackers.
More broadly, reports of rape in Brazil have climbed
significantly since 2009, when the nation’s criminal code was changed to
expand the legal definition of rape to include crimes involving anal
penetration. More than 5,300 people, about 90 percent of whom are women,
registered cases of rape in the first six months of 2012, an increase of more
than 150 percent since 2009.
Ms. Gonçalves, the federal official in charge of combating violence against women, said much of the increase in reports of rape involved efforts to encourage victims to report the crimes. “Women are more courageous about coming forward with what happened to them than in the past,” she said.