A symbolic empty coffin buried at Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for a boy named Eduardo, represents the latest child death in gunfire between the police and drug dealers in the city’s shanty towns.

Since 2007, 18 children have been collateral victims.

At the head of NGO Rio of Peace, among the grassroots organisations protesting, Antonio Costa said: “The middle class don’t often raise an outcry over the killing and human rights violations in the favelas. We want to change the culture in our city. A boy was killed this week. We cannot stay silent!”

The family of ten-year-old Eduardo de Jesus Ferreira says he was hit by a bullet in the head outside his home in the Alemao favela, in the north of Rio.

The Rio State Government covered the cost of his funeral, and Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff has promised to investigate the tragedy.

Stray bullets also killed three other people in Alemao in 24 hours.

Thousands of Rio’s poor took to the streets in outrage th