Honduras prison fire kills more than 350 inmates
OMAYAGUA, Honduras: Honduras on Thursday mourned the more than 350 people who died when fire swept through an overcrowded prison in the Central American country, leaving charred bodies trapped in locked cells.
The incident is regarded as the world’s worst prison fire in a decade.
Survivors described wrenching scenes of prisoners engulfed by smoke and flames and pleading for help, with some unable to flee because they were shackled to the bars of their cells.
Those who were able “tried to save themselves by hurling themselves into the shower, sinks” and any other source of water they could find, one survivor said, while others escaped by jumping from the prison rooftop.
There were reports that others fled the crowded facility in the central Honduran city of Comayagua and were on the loose. Honduras, like much of Central America, has been gripped by drug violence in recent years.
Most of the prison fire deaths were caused by smoke inhalation.
“More than 350 dead, it is an approximation. We cannot rule out that it could be a bit higher, but we are checking so we can give an official and precise toll for this tragedy,” Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla said.
The enormity of the disaster led President Porfirio Lobo to suspend Honduras’s top prison officials, including the corrections chief, as well as those at the Comayagua penitentiary, while an investigation is under way.
“We will be carrying out a full investigation to determine what caused this sad and unacceptable tragedy, and to determine who shoulders the blame,” Lobo said, adding the officials were suspended to ensure transparency in the probe.
Lobo replaced corrections chief Danilo Orellana with his deputy, Abraham Figueroa.
Burned for three hours
The inferno broke out at about 10:50 p.m. on Tuesday (12:50 p.m. on Wednesday in Manila), and burned for about three hours before it was brought under control.
Officials were unclear about the cause, at first believing that the blaze was sparked by a short circuit. But later they did not rule out the possibility that inmates might have deliberately set the fire.
One survivor, Victor Sevilla, said that he was haunted by the desperate cries for help from his fellow prisoners trapped in their cells, who could not get out in time.
“I woke up with all the screaming from my fellow inmates, who were already breaking the wood and zinc ceiling,” the 23-year-old Sevilla told Agence France-presse while he was being treated for a broken ankle after jumping to safety from a wall.
Another survivor, 34-four-year-old Fabricio Contreras, said that the commotion also woke him up. The prisoners headed to the main gate, “but nobody opened it,” he added.
“The prison guards were firing in the air because they thought it was a breakout,” the prisoner said.
Prison officials and rescue workers dressed in white hazard suits moved in on Wednesday to remove the charred remains, as distraught relatives wept openly, clinging to each other as they mourned the deaths of their loved ones.
Prisons in Honduras—and throughout Latin America—are notoriously overcrowded. The country’s 24 penal facilities officially have room for 8,000 inmates, but actually house 13,000.
The prison in Comayagua, located some 90 kilometers north of the capital city of Tegucigalpa, held almost double its official inmate capacity.
The facility is also just 500 meters from a highway that links San Pedro Sula, the economic center of Honduras, with the capital.
The Organization of American States in Washington, D. C. said that it was launching an inquiry into the disaster.