Prison riot deaths mar Haitian government

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — On Dec. 1, with the U.N. peacekeeping force here was preoccupied with the heavy gunfire erupting around the national pal-

ace as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell visited Haitian President Boniface Alexandre, the smoke billowing from the national penitentiary a few blocks away drew scant attention.

Prisoners in a three-story cellblock called “the Titanic” had rioted, broke free from their cells, set fire to mattresses and brandished lengths of water pipe as weapons. Guards called in a special police unit that helped quell the riot. Police officials said seven prisoners were killed and more than 40 detainees and several guards were wounded.

But prisoners and other witnesses said the government is concealing a bloodbath in which police and guards killed dozens of the rioters.

Irrespective of whether these unofficial casualty figures prove true, the killings at the penitentiary represent another black mark for Haiti’s interim government, which has been accused of perpetrating and tolerating a gamut of human rights abuses since seizing power in March after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s ouster.

Amnesty International has denounced arbitrary arrests, illegal detentions and summary executions that witnesses say have been carried out by the national police.

“I saw everything,” said Ted Nazaire, 24, a prisoner on the first floor of the Titanic who was released two days after the riot and is in hiding.

“It was a massacre. More than 60 were killed,” he said, adding that police opened fire on the inmates, then went from cell to cell, forcing prisoners into a passageway and methodically executing them.

Nazaire said he witnessed the executions while hiding under a staircase.

When he was found later, he said, he was beaten viciously by prison guards.

Nazaire said the warden and another prison official warned him not to talk about what he had seen, reminding him that they know where he lives.

Members of his family complain that police harass them in their home nearly every day while hunting for Nazaire, who now walks with a limp, is covered with lesions, and has a swollen left eye and a huge bump on his forehead.

Although penitentiary officials refuse requests to enter the national facility, Chief Prosecutor Jean Pierre Audain gave this reporter special authorization to visit Dec. 15.

During the visit, which lasted about an hour before guards cut it short, estimates given by prisoners about the number killed ranged from 40 to 110. All the inmates rejected the much lower official figures.

“It’s not true,” said Frantz Rubin, a prisoner whose cell has a view into the passageway where prisoners say many of the killings took place. “I saw more than 30 dead people with my own eyes,” he said. “We all want justice.”

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