Eight dead, hundreds hostage in Brazil prison riots

Eight dead, hundreds hostage in Brazil prison riots
REUTERS

FEB 19: At least eight prisoners were killed on Sunday and hundreds of people taken as hostage when an apparently coordinated wave of riots erupted in prisons across the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo.

Police said that they had quashed rebellions in 10 of the 18 prisons, but the situation remained tense at Carandiru, home to 8,000 inmates in the heart of Sao Paulo and the scene of Brazil's bloodiest prison massacre nine years ago.

State Security Secretary Marco Vinicio Petrelluzzi said that eight inmates died during the first 10 hours of riots. Two of them were killed by guards in Carandiru, Latin America's biggest penitentiary.

Luiz Eduardo Greenhalgh, a lawmaker on the Congressional Human Rights Committee, said as many as 3,000 people including 1,200 children could still be inside Carandiru 10 hours after the rebellion began.

Most of the hostages were wives and children making their weekly Sunday visits, when family members of inmates are allowed to go to cells for conjugal relations or a meal.

Many had chosen to stay the night, Greenhalgh said, after they missed their trains home.

Security officials said negotiations to release the hostages would continue throughout the night.

Justice minister Jose Gregori, who was in Sao Paulo, said he was flying back on Sunday night to Brasilia, confident that the situation was under control.

"The situation was worse and remains worrying, but the majority of prisons where there were rebellions are back under control of authorities," Gregori said.

He said the rebellions were "an organized and synchronized response from a certain faction of prisoners to the efforts of the Sao Paulo penal authorities to separate them."

State officials blamed the criminal organization First Commando of Capital (PCC), whose 10 top leaders were transferred from Carandiru to other prisons on Friday. The letters PCC were written in giant letters on prison courtyard walls.

Crack police were seen on television entering Carandiru, but it was not immediately known how far they had penetrated. At one stage aerial footage showed prisoners dragging two bodies across a courtyard, leaving trails of blood on the ground.

Hundreds of family members gathered outside Carandiru, some of them throwing objects at police lined up in front of the main gate.

Carandiru was the scene of the country's bloodiest prison rebellion in 1992 when 111 inmates were shot to death as police stormed the penitentiary.

In the smaller Belem prison, also in in Sao Paulo, police marched out naked prisoners who were made to squat against the wall with their hands behind their necks. Shortly afterwards, women with children in their arms were released from inside the prison.

Prison rebellions are commonplace in Brazil where poor treatment of the inmates and filthy and overcrowded conditions often erupt in violence. A congressional commission recently described Brazil's prison system as a "reinvention of hell".