A huge fire tore through an overcrowded prison in Burundi before dawn on Tuesday, killing dozens of inmates and seriously injuring many more, the country's vice president said.
Many prisoners were still asleep when the blaze took hold in a penitentiary in Burundi's political capital Gitega, witnesses said. Much of the facility was destroyed.
Vice President Prosper Bazombanza, who visited the scene with several ministers, told reporters 38 people were killed and 69 seriously injured.
The blaze broke out at about 4am. Images posted on social media showed flames engulfing the prison and bodies on the floor.
“We started shouting that we were going to be burnt alive when we saw the flames rising very high, but the police refused to open the doors of our quarters, saying 'these are the orders we have received'," one inmate told AFP.
“I don't know how I escaped, but there are prisoners who were burnt completely,” he said.
The interior ministry said on Twitter the disaster was caused by an electrical short-circuit at the nearly century-old prison.
A police source said the emergency services were late to the scene, with the first fire engine arriving two hours after the blaze started.
Victims with serious burns were taken to hospital, some ferried in police pick-up lorries, while others were treated at the scene, witnesses said.
The fire was brought under control, but many parts of the site were left in charred ruins behind a stone wall showing the date of construction in 1926, when Burundi was a Belgian colony.
A large contingent of police and soldiers surrounded the site and prevented journalists from approaching or taking pictures until the ministers arrived.
Teams from the Red Cross in Burundi were at the scene.
The facility, the third largest in Burundi, housed a number of political prisoners in a high-security compound. There was also a women's wing.
The prison was home to more than 1,500 inmates at the end of November, according to authority figures, far higher than its designed capacity of 400.
The same facility was struck by a fire in August, according to the interior ministry, which was also blamed on an electrical fault.
No casualties were reported.
Chronic overcrowding is a problem in prisons in Burundi, one of the poorest nations in the world, and inmates often complain about cramped living conditions and a lack of food.
There were 12,878 inmates living in accommodation designed for 4,294, according to November figures, despite a presidential amnesty in March that led to the release of 5,200 prisoners.
“Sometimes we have gone for up to three days without being given supplies by the prison, and our families cannot help us because since June 2020 we have not been allowed visits under the pretext of protecting us from Covid-19,” one prisoner told AFP.
