Prosecutors in Brazil are investigating reports that illegal gold miners allegedly massacred up to 10 members of a remote, uncontacted tribe in the Brazilian Amazon.
The alleged attack, which is said to have taken place last month, occurred along the River Jandiatuba in western Brazil, and may have gone forever unnoticed by the outside world, were it not for the the miners being overheard boasting about the killings in a nearby town afterwards.
"It was crude bar talk," Leila Silvia Burger Sotto-Maior, a coordinator for Brazil's indigenous affairs agency, FUNAI, told The New York Times.
"They even bragged about cutting up the bodies and throwing them in the river."
Two of the gold miners – known as garimpeiros – have been arrested and taken to the city of Tabatinga to provide testimony about the incident, which, if confirmed, is feared to have wiped out one-fifth of the entire tribe, including women and children.
The Amazon region where the massacre is said to have happened is called the Javari Valley (aka the Uncontacted Frontier), bordered by Peru, Brazil, and Bolivia.
This area is thought to contain more uncontacted tribes than anywhere else on the planet, with an estimated 2,000 individuals across up to 20 isolated groups.
This tribe is known locally as Fleicheros, or "the ones who throw arrows", but as they're an isolated people with little or no contact with the outside world, not an awful lot is actually recorded about them – something which makes attacks like this hard to investigate.