Sixteen beheadings in prison clash
At least 52 people were killed during a five-hour riot and battle between rival gangs in a Brazilian prison yesterday. Sixteen of them had their heads cut off.
Violence broke out early in the morning when gang members from one wing of the Altamira prison in Para state invaded another section of the jail, where a rival group was detained, a superintendent said. He did not name the gangs.
Frequent clashes between inmates in jails across Brazil pose a challenge to President Jair Bolsonaro, the country’s rightwing leader, who promised zero tolerance on crime when he took office in January, after nearly 64,000 murders were recorded nationwide last year.
Human rights groups have accused his government of doing little so far to prevent the violence, with prisons acting, in effect, as recruitment centres for the gangs. Some say the authorities have even encouraged clashes by allowing the prisons to become overcrowded.
Video footage shared with police revealed one of the prisoners kicking a severed head across the floor as if it were a football, a local media agency reported.
Clouds of smoke could be seen billowing from a part of the prison after mattresses were set on fire in a cell. Some inmates died of smoke inhalation. Two prison guards were taken hostage at one point but were later freed.
The riot began at 7am but police did not manage to contain it until midday, the authorities said. ‘‘It is still very hot inside the prison, and we are working to remove bodies,’’ said Jarbas Vasconcelos Carmo, a penitentiary official in Para state, in the north of the country.
The prison was built to contain a maximum of 208 inmates but was holding 372 when the violence broke out.
The attacks and riot are the latest in a series of gang-related incidents in Brazil this year. In May 55 inmates were found dead in a prison in Manaus, also in the north. Rival factions within a drug gang, known as the Family of the North, are believed to have strangled their cellmates using sheets from the prison beds. In September seven inmates from Altamira were killed during an attempted jail break.
Brazil’s justice ministry said it would send a task force to take control of the prisons after the May outbreak, and that gang leaders would be transferred to maximum-security prisons.
In 2017 Brazil was rocked by a similar series of prison riots in which almost a hundred inmates died. The riots prompted calls for the federal government to tackle what experts described as ‘‘systemic failures’’ in the prison system.
Bolsonaro, 63, a former military officer, has been campaigning to dismantle Brazil’s firearms legislation, which he says is expensive and overly strict.