This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

A black lace underwired bra may have saved a woman’s life, according to a news report in Brazil about a narrow escape from a robber’s stray bullet.

Images of Ivete Medeiros’s underwear and the bullet apparently lodged inside were broadcast across the nation on Thursday as the latest – and strangest – example of the accidental shootings that plague the country of 200 million people.

Medeiros, a merchant in the northern Amazonian city of Belém, was reportedly hit by a stray round after she left a supermarket to investigate a disturbance on the other side of the road.

The commotion was caused by a hold-up. News reports said the thief opened fire and a stray bullet hit Medeiros under her left breast.

CCTV footage taken immediately after the incident shows her staggering back into the store before being taken off for medical attention.

Her husband told the Globo channel, he feared his wife had been killed because she had been shot in the heart. She told reporters that all she felt was “a little burning sensation” thanks to divine intervention.

“It was not just the bra wiring, which softened [it] a little, but God who saved me,” she said, showing the small hold made in her blouse by the bullet.

Despite the unusual outcome in this case, stray bullets are a growing menace in Brazil, which has more gun killings than any other country.

Last month, a four-year-old girl and a nine-year-old boy were among a dozen or so victims of stray bullets in Rio de Janeiro, where heavily-armed military police frequently engage in firefights with gangs.

According to the most recent police statistics, stray bullets hit 111 people in the city in 2013, up from 81 two years earlier. Nationwide figures are harder to come by, but similar cases have been reported in several other cities.