Mother, 29, 'held as a sex slave in police cell by cops who took turns raping her during horrifying nine-month ordeal' in Brazil
The 29-year-old woman said officers took it in turns to abuse her at a police station in Santo Antonio do Ica in the rural state of Amazonas.
A lawyer acting for the woman, who is part of Amazonian Kokama indigenous community, said the attacks began after she was arrested and accused of domestic violence against her husband.
But when she was taken to the remote police station, officers threw her in a cell with male inmates and told her there was an outstanding warrant for her arrest.
She then allegedly became a sex slave to the officers who systematically raped her until she was released in August 2023.
The woman is now demanding nearly £67,000 in compensation from the state for the horrific abuse she suffered.
According to an affidavit, the woman's ordeal was so traumatic that she tried to kill herself several times.
'The psychological damages of the gang rape committed in the presence of the newborn and during the period of imprisonment caused her permanent damage,' the document said.
Additionally, the level of abuse she suffered was so physically brutal that two years later she continues to suffer from uncontrollable bleeding in the uterus, her legal team said.
'The physical pain acquired as a result of sexual violence is added to the deep psychological wound that marked the Plaintiff's soul.
'The depression, the suicide attempts inside the prison and the constant fear are silent witnesses to the barbarity suffered.'
Lead attorney Dacimar de Souza Carneiro noted that the abuse happened everywhere in the station - from the cell to the kitchen and even in the weapons arsenal.
'The rapes happened at night, during shifts. In all areas of the police station. The other prisoners didn't say anything because they were also tortured.'
And when she begged them not to rape her in front of her baby son, cops reportedly told her: 'We're the ones in charge here.'
When she was not being raped, the document alleges that she was locked in the police station's only cell with other men and lived in constant fear of further attacks.
The victim identified four military police officers and a municipal guard as the perpetrators.
She was only spared when she was transferred to a women's jail in August 2023, and she told wardens about what had happened to her.
The Amazonas Public Security Secretariat and the Civil Police say they are investigating her allegations.
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The Guardian
8 hours ago
- The Guardian
How the riches of its graduates tied Edinburgh University to slavery
Robert Halliday Gunning was a Victorian success story, an Edinburgh-trained doctor who amassed a fortune in Brazil's goldmines before lavishing his wealth on philanthropic gifts. It also appears he was eaten by guilt. In later life, he ensured his legacy would be linked to acts of benevolence: from the 1880s onwards he paid for endowments, prizes, medals, lectures and academic posts at Edinburgh University, several of which still bear his name. Today they are worth £5.3m. Gunning, a former Edinburgh medical student and anatomist, had been enmeshed in Brazil's enslavement-based gold mining industry. Decades after slavery was criminalised in Britain, he was widely believed to own up to 40 enslaved people – a charge he denied. A recently discovered letter suggests his gifts were a calculated act of reputation washing. He told the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, another institution that enjoyed his largesse, he had 'come forward without being asked, to relieve my conscience, and leave behind what I cannot take away when life ends, and I feel it no sacrifice but an honour to do so'. Gunning was one of hundreds of Edinburgh graduates who made their fortunes from the transatlantic slave trade, on plantations in the Americas or profiting from the empire. They served as doctors on slave ships, administrators, lawyers to enslavers, merchants, plantation owners, or were slavers themselves. The scale of Edinburgh University's entanglements with transatlantic slavery and colonialism has been exposed by new research, commissioned by the university. It has established that Edinburgh raised the equivalent of tens of millions of pounds from donors implicated in slavery or colonial wealth-building. A study by Dr Simon Buck, a research fellow, has found Edinburgh raised at least £250,000 (in historical money) from slavery-linked and colonial donors from the late 1700s until well into the late 1800s. The university sought out those donors, despite bitter and public divisions among students and staff over the morality of enslavement. Buck calculates the donations were equivalent to at least £30m based on current retail prices, derived from tobacco, sugar, cotton, gold, silk, indigo, linen, iron and opium production and trading. Based on present-day earnings, a different measure, that is equivalent to £202m today, or as much as £845m based on the UK's growth in overall wealth and productivity since then. Buck calculates at least £6,258 (in historical money) was raised from hundreds of slavery- and empire-linked donors between 1789 and 1794, about 17% of the total philanthropic donations. That equates to about £1m today based on retail price inflation, or £11m based on growth in earnings. How we present the worth of historical sums of money There are different ways of calculating the present-day value of money spent in previous on work by the Measuring Worth Foundation, Edinburgh University's academics have adopted three measures: the most conservative model is relative price worth (RPW) which measures purchasing power, followed by relative wage or income worth (RWIW) and then finally relative output worth (ROW).For comparison, Edinburgh calculated that the £6,258 it raised in the 1790s to help build a new college building would be worth £955,000 today using the RPW model, £10.9m using the RWIW measure or as much as £78.7m using the ROW Guardian tends to use relative price worth as its main figure, but we have included the other measures for comparison. Similar networks were deployed to fund construction of a new medical school nearly a century later. 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There were bursaries active at Edinburgh until at least 1971 funded by its investors. According to the report, Edinburgh's town council, which originally owned the university, gave it money raised from taxing slavery-linked ships carrying tobacco, sugar and cotton in the port of Leith. Queen Anne, one of many British monarchs with clear links to transatlantic slavery, funded professorships. Many of the ways in which the university benefited from enslavement are hidden from view, but some are still very visible. Five of Edinburgh's best-known historical buildings were constructed with help from slavery-enriched donors: two former sites of the Royal Infirmary hospital – which was partly run using profits from a Jamaican plantation it owned; the St Cecilia's Hall music collection; the New College, built on the Mound by the Free Church of Scotland, and the Edinburgh College of Art. And the university's accountants were shrewd investors. Buck has discovered its slavery-derived wealth was invested in numerous Scottish Highland estates, war bonds, railway companies and colonial government bonds between 1896 and 1946. Limited time made it impossible to calculate how much profit those investments generated.
Daily Mail
14 hours ago
- Daily Mail
A fleeting moment of happiness before disaster: From a doomed hang gliding leap to a selfie with a wild bear - the tragic stories behind haunting last pictures
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Their final Instagram post, uploaded just before the fatal climb, shows Giorgia, a physiotherapist, grinning in full hiking gear as she poses against the glittering, snow-covered mountains. Behind the camera was Alessandro, an amateur filmmaker and her close companion on many mountain adventures. The poignant caption reads: 'Photo by Alessandro, super member for a super climb (and a super descent on a glacier).' Rescue teams were scrambled after other hikers witnessed the avalanche and quickly alerted the authorities. Emergency crews managed to locate the pair, but tragically, both were already dead. The accident is believed to have been triggered by several days of unseasonably warm weather, which had destabilised the snowpack and increased the risk of avalanches. Swiss authorities launched an investigation into the exact cause of the deadly slide. Friends and family say Giorgia and Alessandro were experienced hikers and lovers of the great outdoors who regularly travelled the Alps together. Italy's Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed consular support is being provided to the grieving families and made arrangements to repatriate their bodies.
BBC News
15 hours ago
- BBC News
Wyre councillor charged with raping child
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