Fire ravages detention center, kills at least 68

CARACAS, VENEZUELA » Families of 68 people, mostly prisoners, who were killed in a devastating jail fire in Venezuela gathered outside the scene at a police station Thursday to demand answers, as opposition lawmakers vowed to investigate the tragedy.

A fire ripped through the detention center of a police headquarters west of Caracas onWednesdaymorning as families waited outside for visiting hours to begin. As the flames and smoke engulfed the jail, frantic families clashed with police and had to be driven back with tear gas.

Late Wednesday, the country’s head prosecutor, Tarek William Saab, announced a death toll of 68, including two women who were probably visitors. He promised an investigation to “clarify these dramatic events.”

Local opposition lawmaker Juan Miguel Matheus said the tragedy was compounded by the long wait for answers as people demanded to know what had happened to their sons. No one was allowed to see the bodies long after the fire had been extinguished in the city of Valencia in Carabobo state, about 100 miles west of the capital.

“Part of the drama is that there was no list of dead because many of the bodies were incinerated and it was impossible to recognize them,” he added. He noted that by his count, 78 people died.

The fire struck as Venezuela was convulsing in a historic economic and political crisis. The nation faces serious shortages of basic goods and bouts of unrest as the socialist government attempts to retain its grip on power.

The crisis, experts say, has worsened the already overcrowded prison system, with a growing number of inmates confronting a lack of food, water and medical care. Venezuelan prisons are also hotbeds of drugs and firearms. Inmates have increasingly re- sorted to strikes to protest their desperate living conditions.

The director of a nonprofit prison watchdog group, Windows for Freedom, said the fire began after an attempted jail break failed and inmates set fire to their mattresses.

The prisoners immediately began to succumb to the heavy smoke from the burning mattresses in the cramped cells.

“The fire caused somuch smoke that people started to die in the enclosed space,” said the director, Carlos Nieto Palma.

According to Matheus, at least 180 inmates were crammed into the detention center, far exceeding its capacity of 60.

Nieto Palma said his sources told him that the deaths were all due to smoke inhalation and that the two women among the dead were there on conjugal visits.

Even as the smoke was choking the inmates, many of their family members were outside waiting to visit and bring in food. A few of the prisoners managed to call out to family members with cellphones before succumbing to the smoke, said Tibisay Romero, a journalist and investigator for Windows for Freedom.

The fire was one of the worst jail disasters in a country where human rights officials say that prison conditions are among the worst in Latin America. In 1994, a prison fire in the state of Zulia killed at least 100 prisoners. Last August, at least 37 inmates died in a riot in the southern state of Amazonas.

In the first twomonths of 2018, the Observatory has registered 26 dead in jails, 10 injured, 1,016 prisoners on hunger strikes for better conditions and 90 escapees.

The group’s 2016 annual report said 54,758 prisoners were being held in spaces for only 35,562. That year, it said, 173 inmates died in custody, 58 percent more than in 2015. The report also said 33,000 detainees were in police stations that had capacity for only 8,000.