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Brazil Activist Killed in Hit-And-Run

Posted on: Saturday, 21 October 2006, 00:00 CDT

By MICHAEL ASTOR

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Police released a composite sketch Friday of the man suspected of being the driver who struck and killed an environmentalist who dedicated his life to protecting rare monkeys in Brazil's Atlantic rainforest.

Environmentalist Eduardo Veado, 46, and his wife, Simone Furtini Abras, 41, died after being run over as they walked along a country road in Minas Gerais state on Oct. 5.

Veado apparently had received death threats for denouncing illegal logging around the town of Ipanema, some 250 miles northeast of Rio de Janeiro.

A spokesman for the Minas Gerais state police department, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in accordance with department policy, said police were treating Veado's death as a homicide but did not believe it was connected to the threats.

Fellow environmentalists were not so sure.

"There is circumstantial evidence that this might be linked to the death threats," Gustavo Fonseca, executive vice president of Conservation International, said by telephone from Washington D.C. "In the course of his work, he encountered a lot of irregular activities and illegal logging taking place. He talked to public prosecutors and that created some animosity in the region."

Fonseca, who was a former student of Veado's at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, said Veado received the last death threat some three months ago.

Veado dedicated the last 20 years of his life to protecting the woolly spider monkey, Fonseca said, and his efforts helped the local population rise from about 40 individuals on the farm where he worked to around 140 today.

A 73-year-old American nun, Dorothy Stang, was killed in Brazil in February after spending the last 23 years of her life in the country's lawless Para state trying to protect the rain forest and peasants from loggers and ranchers vying for the area's rich natural resources. She was killed by gunmen allegedly hired by the rancher who wanted to log the area she was trying to protect and whose ownership was being disputed in the courts.

Source: Associated Press/AP Online

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