SAO PAOLO // More people have been murdered over the past four years in Brazil than have been killed in the war in Syria, a Brazilian NGO said on Friday.

Nearly 280,000 people were killed in Brazil from 2011 to 2015, according to the Brazilian Public Security Forum. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights counted 256,124 killed over the same period in that country’s civil war.

To reach their figure, the Forum included intentional killings and violent thefts that resulted in death. More than 58,000 people were killed last year alone.

Last year’s murder rate reached 28.6 per 100,000 people, much higher than the 10 per 100,000 that the United Nations considers the threshold for chronic violence.

Three impoverished states in north-eastern Brazil – Sergipe, Alagoas and Rio Grande de Norte – reported the highest murder rates. Sergipe alone had a murder rate of 57 per 100,000 people.

The overall murder rate however was down slightly from 2014.

The forum’s report, now in its ninth edition, also highlighted the endemic problem of police brutality.

The report said that an average of nine people were killed per day by police.

In 2015, law enforcement killed 3,345 people – but 393 police officers were also killed, about a third of them while on duty.

* Agence France-Presse