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Prison Riot Ends, Hostages Freed

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Written by News Editor

Friday, 25 April 2008

A mutiny at Lebanon's largest prison in Roumiyeh where guards had been taken hostage ended peacefully early Friday. "The prisoners handed over the seven warders they were holding hostage and returned to their cells after having negotiated and handed over demands to the chief of internal security, Antoine Shakuri," a security official said. The prisoners at Roumiyeh, eight kilometers (five miles) northeast of Beirut, were calling for an improvement in their prison conditions and a reduction in their sentences, he said. Most of the inmates were serving long sentences, or were on death row. The official said police chief Gen. Ashraf Rifi promised to examine ways of replying to these demands in the framework of the law. Earlier he said that the rioters had set fire to their cells in the block holding convicted inmates. The mutiny broke out at 4:35 pm Thursday after a quarrel between a warder and a Palestinian prisoner got out of hand. Security sources told Naharnet hundreds of riot policemen advanced across the ground floor of the building after firefighters extinguished a blaze that inmates had started in mattresses after taking guards hostage. "The riot police force moved into the building through emergency outlets, cleared the ground floor which includes the management offices and moved into the first floor" of the three-story building, said one source who asked not to be identified. Each floor includes 60 cells. The rioting inmates are armed with makeshift knives, and "sharp tools," the source added. "They don't have firearms simply because the guards they took hostage were not armed in line with prison rules," the source explained. The advancing force is using "tear gas canisters to control the inmates, some of whom are surrendering," he added. Academic Omar al-Nashabi, who has carried out a study on the prison, told AFP that more than 4,000 prisoners were being held in the jail which was originally designed in 1971 to hold a maximum of 1,500. "The building where the mutiny erupted houses nearly 950 prisoners, 225 of them foreigners, mainly Palestinians or Syrians," he said. The security official said the disturbances did not affect the remand section of the prison where detainees suspected of taking part in a deadly Islamist uprising in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp last summer are being held. He explained that four ex-security commanders, jailed in Roumiyeh in connection with the 2005 murder of ex-Premier Rafik Hariri, are also being held in the remand section about 150 meters away from the convicts' compound at the recommendation of the U.N. commission of inquiry into his killing.(Naharnet-AFP)

 

 

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