A woman suspected of taking a dead man to a bank and attempting to forge his signature has been detained by police in Brazil.
In footage that went viral on social media, the woman was shown taking the elderly man she called uncle in a wheelchair to the Rio de Janeiro branch of Itau Bank to take a loan.
Propping up his head and holding what appears to be a limp hand she also attempts to get him to sign documents.
Police said she tried to take out a $3,000 loan which the bank had approved, but the elderly man’s signatures were required.
One of the bank’s attendants filmed the woman trying to communicate with her ‘uncle’. She asked him if he was listening, said he had to sign the document, and that and she could not do it for him.
The bank’s attendants then told her that he appeared to be unwell and decided to call the ambulance.
News agencies reported Rio de Janeiro civil police chief Fabio Luis Souza saying paramedics who arrived to take him to hospital concluded he had been dead for hours.
He had probably been dead when he was taken to the bank, he said.
A lawyer representing the woman’s family, however, said the man had been alive when she took him to the bank and that the woman was “completely shaken and medicated” after realising he had died.
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