Police exchange shots and kill two criminals in Santos in action to find Rota PM’s killer

Military police officers were involved in clashes and killed two suspects in Santos and São Vicente, on the coast of São Paulo, in the new Operation Shield, which aims to find the criminal who killed the Rota military police officer (Rondas Ostensivas Tobias de Aguiar), Samuel Wesley Cosmo, on Friday (2). In one of the exchanges of fire, a police officer was shot in the arm.

Cosmo was buried this Saturday afternoon (3). Married and father of two girls, he belonged to the 3rd Rota Company. Former president Jair Bolsonaro and the governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas, attended the burial.

On Friday night, the Secretary of Public Security of the State of São Paulo, Guilherme Derrite, published on his social network X (formerly Twitter) that he was in Santos where they would begin an operation to locate the criminals and provide support to the family. On Saturday, he posted about these two confrontations, reporting that one of the police officers had been shot in the arm.

Around 8pm on Saturday, in another post, Derrite reported that police officers from the 3rd Shock Battalion, operating in Baixada Santista and supporting Operation Verão, came across individuals who shot at the team and clarified: “One of them, with passages for robbery and theft, it was neutralized and resulted in death. We will continue to fight crime.”

The São Paulo Public Security Secretariat (SSP) reported that the police were shot at in one of the raids during the operation in Santos. One The suspect was shot and taken to Vicentino Hospital, but did not resist. In São Vicente, the police ordered a second suspect to stop, who tried to flee on foot and shot in the direction of the agents. In both cases, weapons and drugs were found with the criminals.

The main line of investigation into Cosmo’s death is whether the crime is related to the soldier’s actions in the first Operation Shield, which intensified in July last year after the death of Rota police officer Patrick Bastos Reis.

Reis was killed by criminals while patrolling in Guarujá, in Baixada Santista. Days later, 27 people were killed during an operation and the Military Police’s actions were questioned by entities in defense of Human Rights.