‘I saw a young gay man beheaded in Brazilian prison’

FORMER solicitor Michael Lynn saw a gay prisoner being beheaded by other inmates in a Brazilian prison, he has told his multi-million-euro theft trial.

Mr Lynn said conditions in the prison were like something from the TV show Game Of Thrones.

He also said he and his wife were able to conceive when she visited him in prison.

‘Brazilian prisons are very difficult for everybody,’ he said.

‘Conjugal visits exist to maintain peace in what is essentially a war zone.’ Mr Lynn, 53, was giving evidence at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court yesterday. He described what life was like in a Brazilian prison after his arrest in August 2013 in Recife, a coastal city in north-east Brazil.

He said the jail where he was held was beside a dump – ‘a very big dump with rats so big even the cats ran away from them’, he told defence barrister Paul Comiskey-O’Keeffe, BL.

Mr Lynn said that prisons in Brazil were essentially run by the inmates.

‘When I went in, the first three nights I was in a tiny cell shared with 30 other guys,’ he said. ‘That was kind of a holdover prison. You are not given any bowls to eat [from] or utensils to eat.’

Asked about prison security, he replied: ‘The security is as follows: there were 1,800 prisoners and ten security guards. The prisons are run by prisoners.’

In the jail where he was detained, he said he was moved to a part of the complex where they held people who had a degree, such as ‘lawyers and accountants’. Certain prisoners run the prison, he said, and were given a gun and what he described as ‘large swords’.

He told Judge Martin Nolan that violence was commonplace.

He said: ‘I saw people being killed. I saw once a decapitation of a young man whose only sin was that he was gay. I don’t mean [being gay] was a sin but that’s how it was seen over there. It’s extremely macho and all that malarkey over there.’