At least 68 dead as fire erupts amid riot at Venezuela jail

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March 29, 2018 6:13 AM

CARACAS, Venezuela — At least 68 people died when a fire erupted during a riot at a jail in the northern city of Valencia, the attorney general said late Wednesday.

The announcement hours came after crowds of anguished family members had gathered outside the facility, some weeping and others facing off with police officers in riot gear.

Officials had released little information throughout the day.

Tarek Saab, the attorney general, said four prosecutors had been named to investigate the cause and circumstances. All but two of the victims were men, he said.

“What we want is justice,” one relative, María José Rondón, said in a video posted to Twitter. “We want to know everything that is happening.”

Gunfire was reported as the rioting began, although the source and the reasons were unclear, and the fire erupted during the unrest.

The facility, attached to a police station, had a capacity of about 60 detainees, workers at the scene said. But Venezuela’s prisons are chronically overcrowded, with crumbling facilities and a shortage of personnel.

In 2015, the most recent year for which reliable figures are available, 49,644 people were incarcerated in prisons designed to hold 19,000 inmates, InSight Crime, a research organization, reported last year. Another 33,000 people were held in temporary holding cells built for 5,000, it said.

Armed gangs control life in many Venezuelan prisons, and many people die in detention. More than 6,600 people died in the country’s prisons between 1999 and 2015, Human Rights Watch reported, citing data from the Venezuelan Observatory of Prisons. Last year, a mass grave holding 15 bodies was found by construction workers at a prison in the state of Guárico.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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