A television image of the Alcacuz Penitentiary Center near Natal, Rio Grande do Norte state, northeastern Brazil shows inmates throwing objects from the prison roof during a riot, yesterday.
Sao Paulo: The latest prison riot in northern Brazil is thought to have killed more than 30 people, police said yesterday, tripling the earlier estimated death toll.
“There are probably more than 30 dead” after the overnight massacre at the prison in the northeastern city of Natal, police investigator Otacillo de Medeiros told reporters after leaving the jail.
The latest outburst of violence took place at the Alcaçuz jail in the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte, Folha de S. Paulo newspaper said, citing the state’s press secretariat.
The state government’s press office was not immediately available to confirm the reports.
This month’s killings in Brazil’s deadliest jail uprising in decades has exposed escalating turf wars between São Paulo-based gang Primeiro Comando da Capital, or PCC, and the Rio de Janeiro-based Comando Vermelho that risk plunging a chaotic penitentiary system deeper into violence.
Later in the day, police in Brazil entered two prisons where a riot left at least 10 inmates dead, authorities said yesterday.
A statement released by the office in charge of state penitentiaries said the rebellion started in the Alcacuz and Rogerio Coutinho detention facilities, located next to each other outside the city of Natal.
Police entered the prisons yesterday, according to the statement. The riot erupted from fighting between rival gangs and was the latest in a series of massacres in the South America country’s penitentiaries that have killed more than 100.
Authorities have said they expect the death toll from rebellion to rise.
The Alcacuz facility has capacity for 620 inmates, but houses 1,083.
The last rebellion in Alcacuz prison was in November 2015, when a tunnel was discovered in one pavilion. The facility should house 620 inmates but has 1,083. The recent outbreak of prison violence in Brazil began on January 1 and 2, when 56 inmates were killed in the northern state of Amazonas. Authorities said the Family of the North gang targeted members of Brazil’s most powerful criminal gang, First Command, in a clash over control of drug-trafficking routes in northern states. Many of the dead were beheaded and dismembered.
Then again on January 6, in the neighbouring state of Roraima, 33 prisoners were killed, many with their hearts and intestines ripped out.
Experts say First Command, known by the Portuguese acronym PCC, is exploiting overcrowding and squalid conditions in the Brazil’s penitentiaries to expand its reach across the national prison system. The gang runs drug-trafficking operations both inside and outside prisons even though many of its leaders are in maximum security penitentiaries in Sao Paulo state.
