Honduran judge: 358 killed in Honduras prison fire
Associated Press, Comayagua, Hinduras | Thu, 02/16/2012 8:00 AM
Prison fire victim: Forensic workers load into a truck bodies of inmates killed during a fire inside the prison in Comayagua, Honduras on Wednesday (Thursday Jakarta time). Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla said that 272 bodies have been recovered, adding that the death toll from the fire, started by an inmate late Tuesday, was likely to cross 300. (AP/Fernando Antonio)
A Honduran supreme court judge says officials have confirmed 358 dead
in a prison fire, making it the worst of its kind in at least a century.
Justice Richard Ordonez, who is leading the investigation, said that
with 856 prisoners packed into barracks, the farm prison in the Comayagua
province north of the capital was at double capacity.
Ordonez told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the fire started
in a barracks where 105 prisoners were bunked, and only four of them survived.
Some 115 bodies have been sent to the morgue in the capital of
Tegucigalpa.
Witnesses said the fire, started by an inmate, burned or suffocated
the locked-up, screaming men as rescuers desperately searched for keys.
A 1930 prison fire in Ohio killed 322 people.
