A woman has been arrested in Brazil after she brought a 68-year-old man who had been dead for hours into a bank to sign for a loan.

Erika Vieira Nunes wheeled the corpse into the bank in a suburb of Rio de Janeiro and told an employee that the man wanted a loan for 17,000 reais (£2,600), security camera video showed.

She then held a pen to the man saying: “Uncle, are you listening? You need to sign,” according to the footage.

“He doesn’t say anything, that’s just how he is,” she said, adding: “If you’re not okay, I’m going to take you to the hospital.”

Bank staff soon became suspicious as the man’s head kept falling back so they called the police who arrested Nunes.

She was charged with vilification of a corpse and attempted theft through fraud, according to the Rio newspaper O Dia.

The man’s cause of death is unknown.

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“She knew he was dead… he had been dead for at least two hours,” Fabio Luiz Souza, an investigating officer told the breakfast news programme, Bom Dia Rio, on Wednesday.

“I have never come across a story like this in 22 years [as a cop].”

He said police were investigating whether Nunes was actually related to the man.

Her lawyer had argued that the man died at the bank but a police forensic analysis determined he had died earlier, while lying down, Reuters reported.

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