Journalist Charlotte Alice Peet was found by police after she went missing in Brazil in February – but she told authorities she did not want to be contacted by her family
A family has been left devastated after a British journalist who went missing in Brazil was found but said she did not want to be contacted. Charlotte Alice Peet was found in a hostel in the city of Sao Paulo.
The case has now closed after Charlotte, 32, went missing in February but “expressed her desire not to have contact with her family”, according to police in Brazil. “She was there and clearly demonstrated that she had no interest in maintaining contact with her family, nor in returning to her country,” said Missing Persons Unit head Ellen Souto.
She had been spotted getting on a bus from Sao Paulo to Rio de Janeiro and was seen at a bar on Copacabana Beach. She was last heard from when she messaged a friend saying she had plans to travel to Rio and needed somewhere to stay.
The friend told her this would not be possible and Charlotte did not respond to any further messages, including ones from her own family. From February 17 to 24, Charlotte stayed in hostels in Botafogo and Leme, both areas in Rio,
During the police search for Charlotte, authorities accessed the photos taken on her phone and saw selifes she had taken. This included one of her on the coach to Rio and her in the Leme district of the city, where she was at a beachside bar. One photo showed her wearing sunglasses and pouting for her camera, on a street close to Rio’s famous Hotel Hilton Copacabana.
Police said during the time Charlotte was missing that their main line of investigation was a “voluntary disappearance”. Souto said then: “We have two mobile phone numbers for her. The British number receives messages and calls. The Brazilian number, which has an area code for Sao Paulo, is programmed to not receive calls.”
According to Charlotte’s LinkedIn page, she has worked for the likes of The Times, Al Jazeera, the BBC and The Telegraph during nine years in journalism. She lived in Brazil between 2020 and 2022 – her page also says she is fluent in Portuguese – and went back there in November last year after a brief period in the UK.
Previously, Charlotte’s dad Derek Preet said she went back to Brazil without telling her family. “I wouldn’t say that it was normal, there was something on her mind obviously otherwise she would have let us know,” he said.
He added: “It’s very worrying but I don’t have any more to say, I’m very concerned but I just don’t know what’s going on, we’re just trying to pick up the pieces really.”
It comes following a tragic update in the case of rescued backpacker Hannah Almond after a homeless man who became friends with her sadly died. The British tourist began sleeping rough when her belongings were stolen in Peru.
Hannah ended up sleeping under a brdge in the city of Cusco. The man she slept next to became the only person she trusted for the next month.
She was found by a Good Samaritan she had earlier met on her travels who tracked down the 32-year-old after he joined the search for her. But it later emerged the elderly man Hannah trusted died at a charity OAP residence he had been taken to following a brief stay at a hostel. He was found dead in his bed, it is understood.
Cusco public beneficence department legal adviser Henry Gonzales said the man – who died with the initials ‘NN’ for ‘no name’ – was in ok health when he was taken in. There is no suggestion of suspicion in the man’s death, according to recent reports.
