CARACAS, Venezuela — Families of 68 people, mostly prisoners, who were killed in a devastating jail fire in Venezuela gathered outside the scene at a police station Thursday to demand answers, as opposition lawmakers vowed to investigate the tragedy.
A fire ripped through the detention center of a police headquarters west of Caracas on Wednesday morning as families waited outside for visiting hours to begin. As the flames and smoke engulfed the jail, frantic families clashed with police and had to be driven back with tear gas.
Late Wednesday, the country’s head prosecutor, Tarek William Saab, announced a death toll of 68, including two women who were probably visitors. He promised an investigation to “clarify these dramatic events.”
Local opposition lawmaker Juan Miguel Matheus said the tragedy was compounded by the long wait for answers as people demanded to know what had happened to their sons. No one was allowed to see the bodies long after the fire had been extinguished in the city of Valencia in Carabobo state, about 100 miles west of the capital.
“Part of the drama is that there was no list of dead because many of the bodies were incinerated and it was impossible to recognize them,” he added. He noted that by his count, 78 people died.
The director of a nonprofit prison watchdog group, Windows for Freedom, said the fire began after an attempted jail break failed and inmates set fire to their mattresses.
The prisoners immediately began to succumb to the heavy smoke from the burning mattresses in the cramped cells.
“The fire caused so much smoke that people started to die in the enclosed space,” said the director, Carlos Nieto Palma. He added that 200 people were crammed into the detention center, far exceeding its capacity of 35.
[In Venezuela, prisoners say it is so bad they eat pasta mixed with excrement ]
Nieto Palma said his sources told him that the deaths were all due to smoke inhalation and that the two women among the dead were there on conjugal visits.
Even as the smoke was choking the inmates, many of their family members were outside waiting to visit and bring in food. A few of the prisoners managed to call out to family members with cellphones before succumbing to the smoke, said Tibisay Romero, a journalist and investigator for Windows for Freedom.
“When journalists and photographers started arriving, family members started to push at the police to enter, and they threw rocks at the policemen,” she said. “It was really tough.
Police then resorted to tear gas to drive the families back.
“I don’t know if my son is dead or alive,” Aida Parra told the Spanish news agency EFE on Wednesday. “They haven’t told me anything.” She said she had last seen her son the previous day,
In video footage from the scene, one woman who identified herself as the mother of a prisoner railed against police: “What we want is justice. Corrupt police threw gasoline in there. . . . We want justice. We want to know what is happening.”
The fire was one of the worst jail disasters in a country where human rights officials say that prison conditions are among the worst in Latin America. In 1994, a prison fire in the state of Zulia killed at least 100 prisoners. Last August, at least 37 inmates died in a riot in the southern state of Amazonas.
In a statement, the nonprofit watchdog Observatory of Prisons said: “We have been warning of the grave situation of police detention centers that put the lives and personal integrity of the detained at risk. . . . The deaths have to be investigated to define responsibilities.”
Matheus, the lawmaker, said the tragedy highlighted the crisis in the country’s penal system. He said a lack of adequate prisons in Venezuela meant that inmates were often jammed into cramped detention centers in police stations — often for years while they await trial.
“People are in limbo there,” he said, promising to bring the matter up in the National Assembly when it meets again on Tuesday.
In a statement from Geneva, the U.N. human rights body also called for an investigation to establish the causes of the deaths, identify those responsible and pay reparations.
Faiola reported from Miami.
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