Violence flares up in Rio anew as Pan Am Games end

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 1 (Reuters) Police found seven dead bodies today who they believe are victims of a gangland war that has flared anew in violence-plagued Rio de Janeiro after weeks of calm during the Pan American Games.

The games, which were guarded by thousands of additional police and troopers from a paramilitary national security force, ended on Sunday in the city, which has one of the world's highest murder rates.

Police said the corpses of seven men dressed in black were found in a minibus stolen hours earlier in a working-class neighborhood.

Rio state security chief Jose Beltrame said police believed the victims were drug traffickers from the Korea slum who had attempted to invade a neighbouring shantytown controlled by another gang.

In a separate incident yesterday, residents of another slum burned two buses and four cars to protest the killing of a young man from the neighborhood. The residents allege the university student had been killed by police.

''The accusations will be investigated, but it could have been an act of drug traffickers ... It's very easy to blame security institutions,'' Beltrame said.

He also said he thought the flare-up of violence had nothing to do with the end of the games.

Rio Gov Sergio Cabral promised to leave about a third of over 6,000 troopers from the public security force deployed in Rio for the event to help with patrolling the city in the next few months.

During the run-up last month to the Pan American Games, police killed 19 people in one day in a big slum, an incident that rights groups condemned as a massacre.

Some violence experts say the heavy-handed raid was intended as a warning to drug gangs to make sure they kept a low profile during the sports event and was possibly followed by deals between gang kingpins and police to avoid any display of massive violence throughout the games.

The authorities denied any such deals. Rio police are notorious for rough tactics against drug gangs that control many of the city's hundreds of shantytowns. Police often stage military-style raids in which stray bullets kill bystanders.

REUTERS RS KP2334