Riots inside a Sri Lanka prison on Sunday and Monday killed at least 23 people and left 15 critically injured, authorities said, in one of the worst outbreaks of violence among inmates in decades.
The death toll could continue to rise. At midday, injured prisoners were still being carried out of the facility in Negombo, a city about 25 miles north of the capital, Colombo. Inmates as well as guards were among the injured and the dead, prison and health authorities said, without saying how many prison personnel were among the casualties.
Sri Lanka, the small island nation off the southeastern coast of India, has faced criticism from human rights activists for what they say are inhumane conditions inside the country’s prisons, including overcrowding and alleged torture of inmates accused of terrorism.
The justice minister, Harshana Nanayakkara, on Monday accepted responsibility for the incident, saying he was “deeply shocked and saddened.”
The violence began on Sunday evening and involved two rival groups of prisoners, one suspected of smuggling drugs into the prison and another opposed to it, the prison authorities said.
Initially, prison officials believed they had restored order after the first clash on Sunday, said a spokesman for the Sri Lankan government agency that oversees prisons. Then a fresh round of fighting broke out on Monday during breakfast. When guards attempted to restore order, inmates attacked them and chased them to the main gate.
A.C. Gajanayake, the spokesman, said the prisoners then attempted to break through the gate but were unable to do so.
Dr. Pushpa Gamlath, the director of the hospital where many of the injured and dead were taken, said that some suffered gunshot wounds while others had wounds consistent with beatings. It was unclear whether any of the inmates had obtained guns.
The Committee for Protecting Rights of Prisoners, based in Colombo, called for an immediate investigation into the causes of the riots. “Prisoners are human beings too,” the group said in a post on social media.
During a riot in 2012 that left 27 people — all prisoners — dead at the notorious Welikada Prison in a suburb of Colombo, inmates were able to break into a stash of weapons. The incident prompted outrage from international human rights campaigners and opposition politicians in Sri Lanka, who called the incident “a massacre” because of the brutal effort to suppress the violence, and resulted in criminal charges for prison officials.
The head of the country’s prison department was sentenced to death in 2022.
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