Brazilian police busts gang that moved 3 tonnes of illegal Amazon gold

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazilian police carried out a wide operation against illegal mining in the Amazon on Monday, raiding a criminal organization that financed the production and sale of 3.1 tonnes of gold whose origin was hidden with fraudulent papers.

Federal police said in a statement that the majority of the arrests and two dozen search and seizure warrants served were in the south of Para state, where illegal gold mining has surged in recent years in the rainforest, much of that on protected Indigenous reservation land.

"We found that at least 3.14 tons of illegally extracted gold had been laundered using fraudulent statements of the origin of the ore," the statement said.

Much of the gold was refined in Sao Jose do Rio Preto, a city in the north of Sao Paulo state that has a thriving jewelry industry and where illegal gold is melted down into ingots with legal gold, making it hard to trace the illegal metal.

"We have to establish whether the gold was illegal and came from unauthorized mining," the head of the operation, federal police officer Alexandre Manoel Goncalves, told Reuters.

A federal judge ordered the confiscation and freezing of 2.9 billion reais ($514 million) in cash and assets, including vehicles, motorcycles, jewelry and gold nuggets, the police said.

Four companies were suspended, six mining licenses and four gun possession permits were revoked, and four local government officials were ordered removed from office, the police said.

The statement added that Indigenous people were found to be involved in the criminal organization.

(Reporting by Ricardo Brito and Anthony Boadle; Editing by Alistair Bell)