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- RIO DE JANEIRO
(Reuters) - A Brazilian engineer claiming to embody the spirit of a World
War I German field doctor eluded arrest during a raid on his makeshift
office where he treated the poor, police said on Thursday.
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- Rubens de Faria, who says he is the reincarnation of
``Dr. Adolph Fritz,`` started work again this week -- a year after authorities
closed the ``clinic`` where they said he operated on hundreds of cancer
victims and paraplegics without anesthesia.
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- Police raided Faria`s new clinic, a vast dance hall
in a grimy northern district of Rio de Janeiro, late on Wednesday hoping
to catch him red-handed and arrest him for illegal practice of medicine.
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- ``We went to look for him but he`d already vanished.
He must have known we were coming,`` said Wilson Bento, spokesman at the
Rio police department dealing with public health crimes.
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- ``But we`ll keep looking for him as he`s wanted on charges
of charlatanism,`` he told Reuters.
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- This week Faria announced via his Web site that he was
reopening his clinic and hundreds of Rio`s diseased poor quickly lined
up in the hope of a cheap cure for their suffering.
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- Faria, who accepted donations for his fee, saw some 50
patients on Monday but took the next two days off when his father died.
Bento said the clinic is closed.
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- ``It`s being sorted out with the police. The contract
with Dr. Fritz has been rescinded and he is not here any more,`` said a
spokeswoman at the Espaco Malagueta dance hall in Sao Cristovao. ``This
place is sealed off.``
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- Branded a quack and a fraud, the 46-year-old Faria --
famous across Brazil for his ``miraculous cures`` -- says the authorities
were hounding him out of fear of his competition with Brazil`s medical
establishment.
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- ``They closed it (the clinic) in January last year but
for the reason that the Regional Medical Tribunal doesn`t like the competition
from me,`` Faria told Reuters on Tuesday before he disappeared. ``In Brazil
they prefer that isn`t done. That`s how the problem came about.``
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- Faria, who has never received any medical training,
could not be reached for comment on Thursday.
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- Faria has said he was approached in the early 1990s by
the spirit of Dr. Fritz -- a field medic who died in the German trenches
in 1918 -- forcing him to give up his profession as an engineer and dedicate
his life to medicine.
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- When he arrives at the clinic, Faria -- a native Brazilian
-- undergoes a transformation and begins to speak with a thick German
accent, occasionally forgetting common words of the Portuguese language.
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- Believers in Dr. Fritz say he has previously possessed
two other Brazilians. Both died violently and, Faria believes, so will
he.
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