Prison rioters accuse police of mass killing

AS COLIN Powell visited Haitian president Boniface Alexandre earlier this month, the two men were too preoccupied with an outbreak of nearby heavy gunfire to take in the smoke billowing from the country’s main prison a few blocks away.

But prisoners at the notorious Port-au-Prince jail claim the US secretary of state had witnessed a fire which spread as special forces murdered and executed up to 110 rioting inmates.

Scotland on Sunday is the first newspaper to gain access to a three-storey cell block called the Titanic, where prisoners rioted, breaking free from their cells, setting fire to mattresses and brandishing water pipes as weapons.

Prison guards called in a special police unit who helped put down the riot on December 1.

Police officials said 10 prisoners had been killed - seven during the riot and three who later died of their injuries - with more than 40 detainees and several guards wounded.

But according to prisoners and other witnesses, Haiti’s government is concealing a savage bloodbath in which police and guards killed dozens of detainees.

The killings at the jail represent another black mark for the interim government, which has come under fire for allegedly perpetrating and tolerating a gamut of rights abuses since taking over last March from ousted former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Ted Nazaire, 24, a prisoner in the Titanic who was released two days after the riot and is now in hiding, said: "I saw everything. It was a massacre. More than 60 were killed."

Nazaire said police opened fire on the detainees and then went from cell to cell, forcing prisoners into a passageway and methodically executing them. He claims to have witnessed the executions while hiding under a staircase. He said he was badly beaten by prison guards when they eventually found him.

Nazaire, who walks with a limp and is covered with lesions, says the warden and another official threatened him.

Prisoners whom Scotland on Sunday spoke to at the jail refuted the official death toll, with some claiming as many as 110 inmates were killed.

Frantz Rubin, whose cell has a view into the passageway where inmates allege many of the killings took place, said: "I saw more than 30 dead people with my own eyes. We all want justice for this."

In the Titanic, where upwards of 30 prisoners are packed in dank, bare cells reeking of urine, prisoners offered scraps of paper through the bars with descriptions of the killings, lists of the dead and of guards accused of brutality, pleas for help and an elegy with drawings of coffins.

More than a dozen took off their shirts and pulled down their shorts to reveal wounds from beatings and gunfire, many with the bullets still lodged inside their bodies.

Richard Similien, a 33-year-old detainee, says he was forced to cart out bodies from the Titanic to another part of the prison in wheelbarrows normally used to transport cauldrons of rice and beans.

Warden Sony Marcellus dismissed the inmates’ accusations as lies and exaggerations. "The prisoners will never tell the truth," he said. "[The prison guards] are trained to shoot in the air, not at prisoners. They would never fire on prisoners in this way."

He pointed to an affidavit signed by a justice of the peace who had seen only seven bodies on the night of the riot.

But Nazaire and the other prisoners are not alone in their testimonies. Two human rights groups say prison guards asking for anonymity have confirmed that the official death toll is too low.

An ambulance driver who requested that his name was not published said he transported more than 30 bodies in a Toyota Land Cruiser in three trips from the prison to a dumpsite outside the city. He claimed there were two other vehicles also transporting bodies. He said he could not allow the site to be seen because he feared for his life and that of his family.

Jean Pierre Audain, Haiti’s chief prosecutor, said he had ordered an investigation into the riot and its aftermath. Meanwhile, the jail and its inmates remain shrouded in secrecy.

Since December 1, the prison authorities have refused visits from journalists, human rights observers, prisoners’ lawyers and family members.

Last week at the Port-au-Prince general hospital, three prison guards dressed in plain clothes stood over a wounded inmate whose leg was handcuffed to a bed, preventing anyone from speaking to him.

Renan Hedouville, head of the Lawyers’ Committee for the Respect of Individual Liberties, said: "It’s a total blackout. Something shady seems to be going on here."

Outside the jail last Thursday, around 30 women waiting in the shade of the building’s peeling blue and white concrete façade said they had still not seen their husbands and sons. Some have received written messages or assurances from the guards that their relatives are safe, but many are left to guess.

One frail, white-haired woman waiting in line to drop off a portion of rice and beans said: "I have my son inside, Yonel Pierre. Since December 1 I’ve brought food for my son but I haven’t received any news from him. Before I used to get back the dirty dishes, but now I don’t get anything."

Her visits may be in vain. Among the dead confirmed by the justice of the peace is a prisoner with an almost identical name to that of her son.