Tag Archives: prison

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia | AFP | Prominent Ethiopian opposition leader Merera Gudina was freed from jail on Wednesday after the government dropped charges against him as part of a wider prisoner amnesty, state media reported. In his first reported comments after his release, Merera urged the government to hold “honest …

Brasília, Brazil | AFP | Inmates lining up to snort cocaine, booze-fueled parties, and brazen escapes: these unfiltered images from inside Brazil’s prisons are offering outsiders a graphic picture of the anarchic conditions in one of the world’s most populous penitentiary systems. Surviving Brazil’s prisons is certainly not a given. Nine …

Madrid, Spain | AFP | Spanish authorities said Wednesday they had transferred migrants being controversially accommodated at a jail just two weeks after an Algerian man was found hanging in his cell in an apparent suicide contested by his brother. The lawyer for the victim’s family said some of the migrants …

Johannesburg, South Africa | AFP | Former Paralympic champion and convicted murderer Oscar Pistorius has been injured in a prison brawl over the use of a public phone, a South African official said on Tuesday. The double amputee — who is serving a 13-year jail term for the murder of …

Brasília, Brazil | AFP | Brazil’s prison population more than doubled between 2005 and 2016 and cells are now so crowded that there are almost two people for every space, the justice ministry said Friday. With 726,712 detainees in June 2016, Latin America’s biggest country now has the third highest prison …

Kampala. Uganda | GODFREY SSALI | Over 90 inmates from Luzira prison facing capital offences have enrolled for the plea bargain programme in which they have confessed to having committed these offences in exchange for lenient sentences. They Wednesday appeared before Kampala High Court Judge Wilson Kwesiga and pleaded guilty to …

Madrid, Spain | AFP |  The sacked speaker of Catalonia’s parliament left a prison near Madrid on Friday hours after supporters posted her bail of 150 000 euros ($175,000), ending her brief detention over the region’s controversial independence drive. A judge at the Supreme Court in Madrid on Thursday had …

San José, Costa Rica | AFP |  Seven candidates to become Costa Rica’s next president went behind bars to hold an unusual debate in a prison where they answered inmates’ questions about their election platforms. “I hope you feel at home,” one of the prisoners said as the seven politicians …

Rome, Italy | AFP | Two prisoners who were invited to meet Pope Francis for lunch on his recent visit to Bologna took advantage of the occasion to escape, local media reports said Wednesday. The two men, who were being held in a rehabilitation facility for drug addicts and prisoners, were …

Antananarivo, Madagascar | AFP | Authorities in Madagascar Friday announced a ban on prison visits to prevent the spread of a plague epidemic that has killed 36 people in the Indian Ocean island. “In order to protect prisoners from the plague that is spreading outside the prison, we have decided to …