April 4 (Bloomberg) -- Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva plans to send 600 police reinforcements to Rio de Janeiro to fight corruption and organized crime after death squads killed 30 people in the city's suburbs.

The paramilitary officers from other Brazilian states will be deployed gradually over the next few weeks, Flavia Diniz, a justice ministry spokeswoman, said. Federal agents today searched for officers suspected of involvement in last week's killings, which it's believed were retaliation for a police corruption probe, said Claudia Gurreiro, spokeswoman for Rio de Janeiro state security director Marcelo Itagiba.

``The whole Brazilian police intelligence apparatus won't rest for a second, a minute to put the authors of this abominable crime in jail,'' Lula said in a radio address today.

Three Rio de Janeiro state police officers have been arrested for possible involvement in Brazil's largest massacre since at least 1993 when police killed 21 people in a shantytown near the city, said Gurreiro. Investigators suspect at least 10 Rio de Janeiro state paramilitary police played a role in the murders, she said.

The three suspects are being held in their barracks for three days to see if charges are warranted, she said.

Witnesses identified one of the arrested officers as a participant in the shootings, which investigators suspect were a reaction to last week's arrest of eight police in connection with a murder investigation, Gurreiro said.

The eight were arrested after a video camera on a school next door to a police barracks recorded men dressed in uniforms pulling the dead bodies of two men out of a police car, according to a statement by Itagiba last week. The March 26 video images showed uniformed men throwing the severed head of one of the victims over a wall and into the barracks, the statement said.

Reinforcements

Lula government officials agreed to send the police reinforcements to Rio de Janeiro in February and expedited the plan after the killings, Diniz, said in a telephone interview from Brasilia.

More than 950 police officers have been expelled from Rio de Janeiro state's two police forces in the last six years, the security secretariat said on its Web site.

In the last decade, Brazil has endured a series of massacres committed by on and off-duty police officers, including the 1996 murder of 19 farmers seeking land redistribution in the Amazonian state of Para. Off-duty police were charged with killing eight children who lived on the streets in downtown Rio de Janeiro in 1993.

Tension in Rio de Janeiro has mounted in recent weeks as criminal gangs killed a growing number of police, prompting some officers to seek revenge, the Rio de Janeiro newspaper O Globo reported last week.

To contact the reporter on this story: Michael Smith in Rio de Janeiro at mssmith@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: April 4, 2005 14:00 EDT