Google Street View Captures Dead Bodies In Streets Of Brazil

Google’s Street View service in Brazil has been been flooded with complaints after users were shown graphic images of dead bodies in the streets at several locations, according to a report in the UK’s Daily Mail.

The website launched in Brazil last week but quickly attracted attention for the wrong reasons when television station Globo G1 broadcast Google-captured images of a corpse covered by a black plastic sheet and surrounded by blood spatters in a Rio de Janeiro street.

In the images, police cars surrounded the body in Belo Horizonte as officers form a cordon and push back members of the public who have gathered outside the street corner shops.

But several websites and internet bloggers reported other similar images in Rio and further afield.

On Avenida Presidente Vargas, also in Rio, another image seems to show a body lying in the street that has not yet been found or attended by police.

It is not clear how many images of dead bodies were recorded by the Google Street View cameras but after receiving complaints the internet giant issued a statement declaring that ‘all images of the bodies were removed’ from the mapping service.

Brazil, the first South American country to be recorded for Street View, is notorious for its drug-related street violence and in 2007 – the most recent statistics available from the United Nations – there were 48,000 murders.

Read the full article here.

View more images here. Warning: Graphic content.