HONDURAN PRISON FIRE
It was one of the world's worst prison fires and was apparently started by one of the inmates late on Tuesday night at the jail in Comayagua, about 75 km (45 miles) north of the capital Tegucigalp a. By the end of it, 359 people were dead, said Danelia Ferrera, a senior official at the attorney general's office. Officials would have to use dental records and DNA in many cases to identify those killed.A convict was suspected of starting the blaze, said the governor of Comayagua province, Paola Castro. "One inmate got in touch with me just after 11 p.m. to say another inmate had set fire to the prison in block number 6, presumably by setting fire to a mattress," she said, noting she had met the prisoner during her social work at the prison. Jails are stuffed full of convicts in Honduras, which is ravaged by violent street gangs, brutal drug traffickers and rampant poverty. According to the United Nations, the country has the highest murder rate in the world.
Violence on the streets is mirrored by frequent riots and deadly clashes between rival gangs behind bars.But the carnage in the Comayagua prison was shocking even by Honduran standards. Chaos erupted after the blaze took hold."We heard screaming from the people who caught on fire," one prisoner told reporters, showing fingers he fractured escaping the blaze. "We had to push up the roof panels to get out."Injured inmates were filmed being carried out of the jail, some crawling with visible burns. By the time Red Cross volunteer Jose Manuel Gomez arrived, all he could do for many was gather up their remains. "We're placing them into bags in parts because when we grab them, they disintegrate," he said. The inferno was the third major prison fire in Honduras since 2003 with dilapidated jails packed at more than double their capacity across the Central American nation.
Worried and angry relatives surrounded the prison on Wednesday morning, at one point throwing rocks at police and trying to force their way inside the prison. Police responded by firing shots into the air and shooting tear gas at protesters, most of whom were women. President Porfirio Lobo said he had suspended the director of the Comayagua prison and the head of the national prison system to ensure a thorough investigation. He promised to "take urgent measures to deal with this tragedy, which has plunged all Hondurans into mourning." Police reported that one of the dead was a woman who had stayed overnight at the prison and the rest were inmates, but noted some of those presumed dead could have escaped.The government pledged to improve the crumbling prison system but just a year later more than 100 prisoners were killed in a fire in San Pedro Sula. Survivors of that blaze said guards fired on inmates trying to escape or left them locked up to die. Honduras had more than 80 homicides per 100,000 people in 2009, a rate 16 times that of the United States, according to a United Nations report last year. A slow and inefficient justice system has stretched jails to bursting point. The country is a major narcotics trafficking transit point for South American cocaine moving north to consumers in the United States, and authorities say they are grappling with a growing presence of violent Mexican drug cartels. A political crisis ripped through Honduras in mid-2009 when a widely-condemned coup toppled the democratically elected president but the country has been trying to heal divisions since Lobo was elected later that year.
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