Caracas (AFP)— At least 50 people were killed and 90 others wounded Friday in clashes between prison gangs and security guards at a prison in northwest Venezuela, a hospital director said.
Television images showed National Guard troops surrounding the Uribana prison in Lara state as inmates in bloody clothes were taken out of the building.
Behind the barriers, relatives of the prisoners — most of them women — waited for news of their loved ones, many of them in tears.
Most of those injured had suffered gunshot wounds, said hospital official Ruy Medina.
He called the death toll “alarming”, saying it was based solely on bodies brought to the hospital.
Medina said the inmates began arriving at the hospital shortly before midday, and that 14 of the injured had wounds severe enough to require surgery.
Iris Varela, the minister responsible for Venezuela’s prisons, said earlier Saturday that there were an “undetermined number” of casualties from the clashes. Attempts by AFP to get an update from the ministry later in the day were unsuccessful.
Vice President Nicolas Maduro, freshly back in the country after visiting recovering President Hugo Chavez in Cuba, called the riot “regrettable” and “tragic”.
He announced a full-scale investigation into the clashes by the prosecutor’s office.
Varela said the riot was sparked after inmates rebelled when prison authorities launched a sweep of the facility in search of illicit weapons.
Authorities had swept to “completely disarm” the prisoners after receiving a tip-off that prison gangs were readying to fight, she said.
Opposition parties immediately attacked the government, accusing it of exercising lax control over the prison system.
“Who will they blame for this massacre this time around?” opposition leader and former presidential candidate Henriques Capriles said in a tweet.
“The government is incapable and irresponsible,” he added.
Humberto Prado, head of the non-governmental Venezuelan Prison Monitoring Organisation said that the government “had failed to take responsibility for the events” and instead was “piling blame on the media.”
The situation in Uribana prison has been monitored by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights since 2006, he added.
“The court told the Venezuelan government that no more inmates should be dying in this jail, but the government did not comply with this request, and now we have such a serious outburst of violence,” he said.
Venezuela is notorious for the poor state of its prisons, which suffer from some of the highest levels of overcrowding in Latin America.
Originally built to house 14,000 inmates, the country’s prisons now hold almost 50,000 people behind bars.
Low sanitary standards and high levels of violence are common.
Last August, at least 25 people were killed and 43 wounded during a clash between rival gangs in Yare I prison near Caracas. In June 2011, dozens died in a riot that erupted at El Rodeo prison.
