MONTERREY, Mexico – An
inmate riot that may have been staged to cover a breakout killed 44
prisoners Sunday, and the jail's director and all guards on duty at the
time have been detained, a security official said.
Nuevo Leon state public security spokesman
Jorge Domene Zambrano said the riot broke out at about 2 a.m. in a
high-security section of a state prison in the city of Apodaca outside
the northern industrial city of Monterrey.
The fight between two cell blocks, each with
about 750 prisoners, may have been staged as a cover for a prison
break, he said. Domene said in counting the dead, officials discovered
some prisoners missing, but didn't know yet how many.
Forty-four people died before state police regained control about two hours later.
Investigators are looking into whether the
fight was started by members of the rival Gulf and Zeta cartels, once
the same organization. Their split two years ago has caused a spike in
violence in the region around Monterrey, Mexico's third-largest and once
the country's symbol of development and prosperity.
The prison had members of both gangs, who
were normally separated, fueling theories that the 17 guards on duty
could have been involved. The prison director, the director of security
and a supervisor also are being held, Domene said.
The victims died from makeshift knives and blows, Domene said, adding that no firearms were found among the prisoners.
Deadly fights happen periodically in
Mexico's prisons as gangs and drug cartels stage jail breaks and battle
for control of penitentiaries, often with the involvement of officials.
Sunday's riot was one of the deadliest so far.
All 2,500 inmates in the prison were
incarcerated for federal crimes, and as many as 70 percent had yet to be
convicted, Domene said. The inmate population grew by 1,500 in the last
year to 180 percent capacity, the result of a crackdown on organized
crime and drug trafficking in the last year, he added.
More than 47,500 people have been killed in
drug-related violence since 2006, when President Felipe Calderon
intensified Mexico's crackdown on organized crime.
Families of prisoners protested outside the
prison because they couldn't get information on the victims. Only 10 of
the dead had been identified by late afternoon.
The Apodaca prison was also the scene of a
fire last May that killed 14. Officials then said the blaze could have
been caused by a short circuit, not a prisoner uprising.
The bloodshed Sunday was just the latest in a string of deadly prison riots in Mexico in recent years.
Thirty-one prisoners died in January during a
prison riot in the Gulf coast city of Altamira in Tamaulipas state,
which borders Texas. Another fight in a Tamaulipas prison in the border
city of Matamoros in October killed 20 inmates and injured 12.
Last July, a riot at a prison in the border
city of Juarez killed 17 inmates. Mexican authorities detained the
director and four guards over that clash. Surveillance video showed two
inmates opening doors to let armed prisoners into a room where the slain
victims were reportedly holding a party.
Twenty-three people were killed in a prison
riot in Durango city in 2010, and a 2009 riot in Gomez Palacio, another
city in the northern Mexican state of Durango, killed 19 people.
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