The fire breaks out early in the morning. 41 prisoners are found dead, there are several injured. A disaster for the relatives of the victims.
Jakarta – At least 41 prisoners were killed and eight others were seriously injured in a fire in a prison near the Indonesian capital Jakarta.
The fire broke out early in the morning in the Tangerang correctional facility, about 20 kilometers from the metropolis, said police spokesman Yusri Yunus. “41 people were found dead,” he said. 30 others were slightly injured. The flames have been brought under control. The cause of the fire has not yet been determined.
Rika Aprianti, a spokeswoman for the Director-General of Prisons at the Justice Department, said the fire destroyed a block of the prison that housed 122 inmates, mostly drug addicts. “This is a disaster and our condolences go out to the families of the victims,” she said. The prison wing was overcrowded and actually only designed for 40 prisoners.
Like many other prisons in the Southeast Asian island nation, the prison in Tangerang is chronically overcrowded. According to the Ministry of Justice, more than 2,000 convicts recently served their sentences there, although the building was built for a maximum of 600 prisoners.
“Our judicial system relies on detention as a form of punishment,” said a statement from the Institute for Criminal Law Reform. A big problem is the failed war on drugs in the fourth most populous country on earth. “The majority of the 28,241 drug convicts in Indonesian prisons are drug users who shouldn’t be in custody at all,” the institute said. dpa
