At least 129 dead and 59 injured in attempted escape from Congo’s largest prison

An attempted escape from Makala prison, the largest in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), ended early Monday morning with at least 129 inmates dead, 24 of them from gunshot wounds and the rest from asphyxiation or crushing, 59 wounded and an undetermined number of inmates raped, according to Interior Minister Jacquemain Shabani. In addition, a fire started during the escape attempt destroyed the offices, the infirmary and the food warehouse. The prison, built for 1,500 people, houses some 14,000 inmates and the harsh living conditions inside have been criticized on numerous occasions.

The incident began at around 2am on Monday when residents around Makala began to hear explosions and gunshots coming from the prison, located south of Kinshasa, the Congolese capital. The Interior Ministry has announced the opening of an investigation.

“The government is pleased with the return of calm, deplores these tragic events and offers its condolences to the families of the victims,” Shabani said in a public statement to the nation in which he also announced the meeting of a crisis cabinet with the security forces. In 2017, some 4,500 prisoners escaped from this prison following an attack organised by a nationalist sect to free its leader.

For his part, Constant Mutamba, the Minister of Justice, described the attempted escape as “premeditated acts of sabotage” while they were “travelling through the interior of the country to extend the policy of decongestion in prisons and improvement of prison conditions”. He also assured that the investigations underway aim to identify and severely punish those responsible for the attempted escape, who are expected to receive “an implacable response”. On Monday, the Minister of Justice banned all transfers of prisoners to Makala prison and assured that the project to build a new prison on the outskirts of Kinshasa would be accelerated.

Speaking to the media, Deputy Minister of Justice Samuel Mbemba was highly critical of the judges. “The first to be responsible for all this are the magistrates who send even mere suspects to prison. In Congolese criminal law, freedom is the principle. Detention is an exception, which means that prison is, in principle, made for convicted persons (…) We are making efforts to ease congestion, but every day there are contingents, vehicles of prisoners arriving, which nullifies the efforts made by the government to provide space in prison and for them to live in humane conditions.”

“How can we understand that a civilian prison built for 1,500 people now houses, according to estimates, 14,000? The prison is overcrowded, there is overcrowding, there are deaths every day. The international community cannot stand by and do nothing,” says Emmanuel Cole, a Congolese human rights activist. Last July, journalist Stanis Bujakera made public several videos of the inside of the prison, recorded by himself, in which prisoners can be seen sleeping piled up on the floors and in the bathrooms, with no room to move. “It is the antechamber of hell, a concentration camp where three or four people die every day,” the journalist described the living conditions in the prison.

In the days following this denunciation, the Congolese government released hundreds of prisoners, many of whom were in pretrial detention before being tried. However, new prisoners were being admitted to the prison, which has not led to any real relief from overcrowding, according to Cole, who heads the local NGO Bill Clinton Peace Foundation. For his part, opposition leader Martin Fayulu strongly condemned through X “the brutal murder of prisoners in Makala prison”. “These summary executions are an unacceptable crime that cannot go unpunished. I demand that light be shed on this massacre and that those responsible be brought to justice. Respect for human life and dignity must prevail in the DRC,” he wrote.

Follow all the international information at Facebook and Xor in our weekly newsletter.