Nearly 50 prisoners broke out from a jail in the southwest Democratic Republic of Congo in the night from Monday to Tuesday, according to local sources.
Prison breaks are a feature of life in the DRC, where the majority of jails were built by the country’s Belgian colonisers and are today overflowing with inmates.
“Of the 104 prisoners being held in the central prison of Idiofa, 47 have escaped,” Arsene Kasiama, coordinator of a local civil society organisation, told AFP.
Located some 600 kilometres (370 miles) east of the capital Kinshasa, the Idiofa prison was built in 1937 under Belgian rule.
The escapees were all held in one of the prison’s two remaining cells and because they were “suffocating, they breached the wall and fled”, said Kasiama.
Kasiama added that the officer on duty “fired several shots” in an attempt to prevent the escape, without killing any of the fugitives.
Confirming the prison break, Idiofa administrator Adelard Kintolo argued that the penitentiary “no longer conformed to standards”.
“The fence is there, but it won’t hold much longer, the walls are worn out. We ask the government to take this into account… they could consider the construction of a new prison facility to improve detention conditions,” he told AFP.
Prisoner rights groups frequently point to poor detention conditions in the DRC and have called on the authorities to work to reduce prison overcrowding.
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