RIO DE JANEIRO — Police in Brazil said Sunday that two people have been arrested in connection with a suspected plot to detonate a bomb at a free Lady Gaga concert before a crowd of some 2 million fans at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro.
Rio de Janeiro’s state police and Brazil’s Justice Ministry presented the bare outlines of a plot that they said involved a group that promoted hate speech against the LGBTQ+ community, among others, and planned to detonate homemade explosive devices at the concert Saturday night, which drew the largest crowd of the pop star’s career.
“The plan was treated as a ‘collective challenge’ with the aim of gaining notoriety on social media,” the police said. The group, it added, disseminated violent content to teenagers online as “a form of belonging.”
Authorities arrested two people in connection with the suspected plot — a man described as the group’s leader in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul on illegal weapons possession charges and a teenager in Rio on child pornography charges. Police did not elaborate on their exact roles in the plot or on how the group came to target Lady Gaga’s beach concert.
“Those involved were recruiting participants, including teenagers, to carry out integrated attacks using improvised explosives and Molotov cocktails,” police said.
The Justice Ministry said that it determined the group posed a “risk to public order.” It said the group falsely presented itself online as “Little Monsters” — Lady Gaga’s nickname for her fans — in order to reach teenagers and lure them into “networks with violent and self-destructive content.”
During a series of raids on the homes of 15 suspects across several Brazilian states, authorities confiscated phones and other electronic devices. Even as police said they believed homemade bombs were intended for use in the planned attack, there was no mention of the raids turning up any weapons or explosive material.
Lady Gaga’s publicists and concert promoters did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Police said they carried out the raids quietly Saturday in the hours leading up to the concert while “avoiding panic or distortion of information among the population.”
The ministry said there was no affect on those attending the free concert.
