[ad_1]
The death toll after a riot in a Venezuelan prison increased to 47, according to a new balance offered this Saturday to the AFP by an opposition deputy and an NGO, which also reported 75 wounded.
“So far 47 confirmed and 75 injured have been confirmed”, said the deputy María Beatriz Martínez, elected by the Portuguese state, where it is located in a penitentiary center, balance with which the NGO Venezuelan Observatory of Prisons agreed. A known preliminary balance on Friday reported 17 dead and nine wounded.
Mutineers
At the Los Llanos Penitentiary Center, in the city of Guanare, “(a) disturbance of public order arose”, when the inmates broke “the perimeter security bars” in “an attempt to escape massively,” a military report detailed. this Friday.
Center personnel, guarded by the military, tried to mediate with the “leader” of the riot, but the prisoners attacked them, managing to “wound the prison director in the back with a penetrating puncture object,” the report states.
A lieutenant was also injured by shrapnel from a grenade, according to the report.
Carolina Girón, from the Venezuelan Prisons Observatory (OVP), an NGO defending the rights of prisoners, stated that the reason for the uprising is that “The prisoners are upset because they do not allow them to visit and they have no food or water ”in a prison with high overcrowding.
The capacity of the prison, according to the activist, is 750 inmates, but currently it has about 2,500 prisoners.
Following the quarantine declared in Venezuela in March by the new coronavirus pandemic, Family visits to inmates were prohibited by the Ministry of Penitentiary Affairs. Prisoners often receive food and medicine from their loved ones.
The OVP documented 97 prison deaths in 2019, 70% due to diseases such as tuberculosis due to the lack of medicines and medical attention.
A Window to Freedom, another NGO defending prisoners, last year counted another 192 deaths, in crowded police cells due to lack of space in prisons.
[ad_2]
