The deadliest police operation in the city’s history has left 28 dead, including a police officer.

Residents say police killed suspects who wanted to surrender and entered homes without a warrant.

Police have denied any wrongdoing, saying officers acted in self-defence.

Rio de Janeiro is one of Brazil’s most violent cities, and vast areas are under the control of criminals, many of them linked to powerful drug-trafficking gangs. Security forces are often accused of disproportionate force during their anti-crime operations.

Thursday’s raid in Jacarezinho, one of the city’s largest slums known as favelas, was carried out by about 200 heavily armed police officers and included an armoured helicopter with a sniper. The area is dominated by Comando Vermelho, or Red Command, one of Brazil’s largest criminal organisations.

A television helicopter filmed men jumping from rooftops, while desperate residents posted videos on social media showing intense shootouts as they claimed police had invaded their houses and used excessive violence.

“There are boys who have been cornered in the house and want to surrender,” one resident said, referring to the suspects. “And the police want to kill them. They have even killed some in front of us.”

In another video, a resident filmed a police officer standing next to a house and said: “They’re cornering [the suspects]. They don’t want to let the boys surrender.”

Public defender Maria Júlia Miranda said residents told her a suspect was killed in the bedroom of an eight-year-old girl where there were blood stains on the floor and on her bed, and that the family had witnessed the alleged execution.

Ms Miranda said she was “shocked” by seeing “lots of pools of blood… and walls with bullet marks” when visiting the favela. There was also evidence that the scenes of the killings were not preserved, she said, with bodies being removed. “On these cases,” she added, “there was probably an execution.”

Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, said they had also received reports and images from residents saying that their houses had been invaded, and that the police had killed people when they already offered no risk.

“It’s completely unacceptable,” Jurema Werneck, executive director of Amnesty International Brazil, said in a statement. “Even if the victims were suspected of criminal association, which has not been proven, summary executions of this kind are entirely unjustifiable.”

The level of violence caused shock even in Rio, which for decades has been plagued by high levels of crime and police brutality. Between January and March, 404 people were killed in police operations in the city’s metropolitan area, according to official figures.

Almost all raids happen in communities where residents are mostly black and poor, and some of the victims are not even suspects. Critics say the operations are often badly planned and frequently end in bloodshed while allegations of misconduct by officers are rarely investigated, with impunity virtually the norm.

“This kind of operation doesn’t dismantle criminal groups, it only causes pain and distrust,” the Igarapé Institute, a Rio-based think tank, said in a statement. “The social impact of this case is still unknown but will certainly last for years.”

Amid widespread condemnation, the United Nations human rights office called for an independent investigation, describing it as a “long-standing trend of unnecessary and disproportionate” police operations.

“You have the institutions which control these operations… So, it appears that collectively, they are not succeeding in stopping these kinds of really disturbing, over-the-top, lethal operations. So something is clearly wrong there,” spokesman Rupert Colville said in Geneva.

The officer killed was named as 48-year-old Inspector André Leonardo de Mello Frias, who was shot in the head while trying to remove a barricade set up by the criminals. Police have not yet identified the other people killed but said six suspects had been arrested.

Deputy Police Chief Rodrigo Oliveira defended the police’s actions, saying that officers acted within the law. “The only execution that took place was that of the police officer,” he said at a news conference where police displayed an arsenal of weapons that had been seized, including six assault rifles and a submachine gun.

Police say they launched the operation to serve 21 arrest warrants as part of a year-long investigation that suggested gangs were recruiting children, among other crimes. Experts again questioned the force used given that minors are used by criminals across the city.

“This is cruel, barbaric,” Joel Luiz Costa, a lawyer from Jacarezinho, said in a video posted on Twitter. “Twenty-five people or more were killed. Did it end drug trafficking? Will this end drug trafficking?”

The raid happened despite a court ruling last June that restricted police action in poor areas of Rio during the pandemic unless it was deemed essential. The Rio state public prosecutor’s office said it would launch an investigation while the police said they would also open an inquiry.

Far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has not commented. He supports changes in legislation that would protect officers from prosecution if they kill suspects, and has previously said that “a good criminal is a dead criminal”.

BBC- Inside a New York courtroom, the president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, was known simply as “Co-conspirator 4”.

Yet being stripped of the deference his position traditionally commands was the least of his concerns. US prosecutors now consider him to be intimately and demonstrably linked to violent drug cartels.

In 2019, his younger brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, was found guilty of smuggling tonnes of cocaine into the United States during a criminal career that spanned over a decade.

To have your brother sentenced to life plus 30 years for drug trafficking would be a stain on any politician’s record. But under the full glare of the world’s media, prosecutors alleged his government was corrupt to its core – causing irreparable damage to his legitimacy as president.

And it is not just the case against his brother in which US prosecutors have identified the Honduran president.

During the recent trial in New York of Honduran drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez, the prosecutor painted a grim picture of Honduras as a “narco-state” where the cartels had infiltrated “police, military and political power… mayors, congressmen, military generals and police chiefs, even the current president”.

“In the 10 years before 2010, the traditional narcos had acquired so much political power in Honduras that they then began to co-opt the state itself to ensure their safety,” says a former Honduran state attorney, Edy Tabora.

That period coincided with the rise of Tony Hernández in the drug world and his older brother into politics. Once Juan Orlando became president in 2014 and Tony Hernández a member of Congress for the National Party, they were effectively “narco-politicians”, alleges Mr Tabora.

President Hernández called his brother’s sentence “outrageous” and repeated his constant refrain that the conviction was based on the testimony of known criminals with an axe to grind.

Tony Hernández was found guilty of receiving $1m (£720,000 in current figures) from the notorious drug lord, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, for his brother’s election campaign.

US prosecutors also allege that President Hernández accepted bribes in exchange for the protection of his security forces and planned to “shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos”, referring to potential foreign users.

It was, they argued, nothing less than “state-sponsored drug trafficking”.

The accusation is that – unlike countries where drug cartels work in tandem with corrupt elements of the state or the security forces – in Honduras the drug traffickers are the state, the very same people who control the apparatus of power.

“That’s the most important point to understand about Honduras”, argues Mr Tabora. “The problem here is that the public functionaries wanted control over the drug trade.”

The BBC asked President Hernández’s office for an interview or a statement. So far, neither has been provided.

“We’re talking about an entire political class,” says Jennifer Ávila, editor-in-chief of Contra Corriente, a digital media outlet in Honduras.

“We’ve seen former parliamentary deputies on trial and members of the economic elite, one of whom is standing for president this year,” she says, referring to Yani Rosenthal, a presidential candidate for the opposition Liberal Party who was convicted of laundering money for the Cachiros cartel in 2017.

Juan Orlando Hernández is a headache for US President Joe Biden. He is the first sitting Latin American president since Manuel Noriega in Panama in the late 1980s to have his name so closely linked to drug trafficking in a US court.

One might expect the White House and the state department to impose sanctions or, at the very least, distance themselves from the alleged “narco-president”. Instead Washington’s economic and security interests are undoubtedly at play, especially regarding undocumented immigration.

Honduras was quick to comply with President Donald Trump’s harshest policies on immigration but as his brother was convicted, President Hernández indicated that bilateral security co-operation could “collapse” over the affair.

“At this moment he is the elected president of Honduras, we are going to work with his government, we are going to look for areas of common interest,” said Juan González, President Biden’s top adviser on Latin America.

“It doesn’t surprise me,” retorts Jennifer Ávila. “What most interests the US is preserving governability. They don’t want a political vacuum or a transitional government because that would bring more instability to Honduras and generate more migration.”

Were Juan Orlando Hernández to be forced out, she says, the country simply “isn’t prepared for a crisis of that magnitude”.

Washington appears to prefer the status quo – even one tainted by drug money.

“When Trump left office, clearly we’d hoped for a different position from the Biden administration,” explains Gabriela Amador of the Pro-Honduras Network, an anti-corruption group of US-based Hondurans that covered every moment of the trials in New York.

“What worries us as Hondurans is that it’s been shown that cartels have invested millions into politics and Juan Orlando Hernández may try to remain in power perpetually through fraudulent means.”

His previous election win in 2017 sparked violent protests after the vote count was considered untrustworthy by international election observers.

Although President Hernández refutes the allegations, the convictions obtained by the US Department of Justice reveal a country mired in drug-related corruption – a description which former state attorney Edy Tabora reluctantly accepts about his homeland.

“The prosecutors in New York put it best when they called Honduras a ‘corrupt narco-state’,” he says, “because both mechanisms – corruption and drug trafficking – were used to seize the state’s resources.”