A bus carrying journalists at the Rio Games was hit by gunfire on Wednesday morning.
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“We are talking about an urban area, densely populated”.
“We think this is an act of vandalism and not a criminal act with the intention of injuring one person so we need to increase the frequency of the mobile patrolling and police along the road”.
“We don’t know yet if the bus was shot, or it was a stone”, organizing committee spokesman Mario Andrada told a news agency.
Violent street crime in Rio de Janeiro raised security concerns in the run-up to the Games, with 85,000 soldiers and police deployed – twice as many as London did four years ago.
On Saturday, a stray bullet flew through the roof of a media tent at the Olympic Equestrian Center.
It was confirmed on Monday by Andrada that the bullet was sacked at a security camera on a police blimp from one of the Brazilian city’s favelas and the global equestrian media were not the intended target.
A Press Association photographer, travelling on the bus at the time of the incident, said: “We were travelling from the hockey venue to the Main Press Centre”.
O Globo, the Rio daily newspaper, said passengers reported a noise that sounded like gunshots, but said authorities attributed the damage to rocks. “It was the sound before I ever saw the glass (shatter) or anything”.
A journalist from Estado de Sao Paulo said that military cops did not bother inspecting the bus before declaring it had been stones thrown, which he thought improbable as they were a long way from houses and they all seemed to come from exactly the same position.
“Roughly halfway back, I was texting my daughter about our dinner plans for the evening, when I suddenly heard two shots ring out in close succession”.
“The bus didn’t come to a stop but paused”.
“I instinctively got as low as I could to the floor, and yelled for others on the bus to do the same”. The bus driver stopped the bus about half a minute afterwards. People started shouting “just keep going”. “After a couple of minutes we had a police escort”. Two of them suffered minor injuries.
Correa was adamant that the impact was caused by a rock, or two rocks, but suggested it could have been fired by a catapult.
Andrada said a separate incident, involving a man who impaled himself after falling off a fence in the media complex, was a “one-off” and had nothing to do with the quality of facilities.
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Rio Olympics organizers stepped up police patrols on Wednesday as security concerns mounted over the threat posed by street violence, with a Games bus being hit by stones and a security patrol coming under fire near Rio’s worldwide airport.
