Gunmen in Brazil Shoot Sleeping Street Kids, Killing 7 : Violence: A survivor says one of the killers was a police officer. An official denies involvement.

Five men wielding revolvers opened fire on a group of street youths sleeping on a broad plaza in the heart of downtown Rio de Janeiro early Friday, killing seven.

A 16-year-old boy, one of two who were wounded but survived, told police and reporters that the gunmen sped up to the square in a taxicab and a beige Chevette sedan, leaped to the pavement and without a word of warning fired at point-blank range into a group of about 30 youths. They were huddled by a fountain at Rio’s most famous church, the stately Nossa Senhora de Candelaria.

In the hail of gunfire, three of the youths apparently died in their sleep; four others were hunted down as they tried to escape. An eighth was hospitalized, in a coma. The rest managed to flee into the dark downtown alleyways.

The wounded witness, identified only by the initials R.M.F. and now under court protection, said that at least one of the attackers was a policeman. He said the man is known on the street for his truculence and his threats against the dozens of minors who sleep or gather in plazas, parks and stoops downtown.

The youth said he believed the attack to be an act of revenge against kids who had stoned a police van when one of their friends was arrested for sniffing glue. Street children often smell bags smeared with shoemaker’s glue to get a cheap high and to blunt hunger pains.

Speaking for the military police force, Maj. Fernando Belo flatly denied involvement by police, citing the boy’s statements that some of the attackers wore hoods and could not be identified. But several youths testified that police officers they knew were involved and identified a police sketch of one of the attackers as a policeman.

Investigators were holding one military policeman, Jose Marcelino, for questioning Friday night.

A Rio state legislator, Regina Gordilho, citing eyewitness reports, named three police officers who allegedly participated directly in the killings.

The crime sent waves of indignation across the country. Brazil has grown only too accustomed to news of violence by shadowy death squads against the children who live and sleep on the streets.

A group of youth counselors from 13 countries, gathered in Rio for a congress, staged a march on the plaza, bearing a pair of coffins symbolic of “murder by hire.”

“As a father, as a citizen and as president of the republic, I am horrified,” said President Itamar Franco. Franco ordered an immediate investigation by the justice minister, Mauricio Correa. Correa dispatched the head of his human rights division to Rio to open a parallel probe.

Last year, state authorities arrested 48 members of so-called death squads, 33 of whom were active members of Rio’s state-run military police. Merchants and middle-class residents, enraged by petty assaults and vandalism and the lack of official law enforcement, have sometimes turned to such clandestine killers to rid the streets of suspected criminals.

State authorities have reported that an aggressive crackdown on death squads has greatly reduced violent crimes in Rio, including incidents against street children.

But youth advocates disagreed. “This vicious murder proves that violence against children continues unabated,” said Ivanir dos Santos, director of the Center for Mobilization of Marginalized Populations.

Citing an independent study, Dos Santos charged that in just the first six months of this year about 320 youths, 17 and younger, had been killed in Rio.