Torture probe

Press, 29 October 1977, Page 10

Torture probe

iNZPA Brasilia The Brazilian Government will investigate charges published in Brasilia that : tcurity police tortured 15 people suspected of subversive activity, a Presidential spokesman has said. The liberal Rio de Janeiro daily newspaper, “Jornal do Brasil,” published the testimony of a group of professors and students charged with membership in the Proletarian Emancipation Movement which the Government Fas charged is linked to the illegal Brazilian Communist Partv.

Relatives of the alleged victims charged in a letter to the newspaper that their kin had been beaten, submitted to electric shocks, and confined to refrigerated ichambers equipped with

television monitors. The denunciation came two years after the Brazilian leader, President Ernesto Geisel. fired an army commander in Sao Paulo after a journalist, Wladimir Herzog, died there after being tor-1 tured by security police.

President Geisel, the fourth general-President to rule Brazil since the military seized power in 1964, has said he would root out torturers in the Government security organs, which are under military supervision. The pledge, along with others to reduce press censorship and to loosen up authoritarian controls, has given him the image of a liberal reformer among his military peers. Thirteen of the alleged victims are still in prison, the relatives’ group charged.