92 prisoners escape from DR Congo prison

Ninety-two prisoners have escaped from the central prison in Kindu in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, while police shot dead two others, the mayor of Kindu said Wednesday.

On Tuesday, taking advantage of "the weakness of the prison building," the detainees "broke the walls, removed the clay bricks" and escaped, mayor Michel Olle Okoko told AFP.

"Policemen on guard opened fire and mortally wounded two fugitives, one in the chest and one in the head," Okoko said, adding that a third prisoner was wounded in the face.

According to the mayor, the detainees had planned their escape over several days and most of those who escaped were "thieves, who have always terrorised the town" of Kindu, which is the capital of Maniema province.

The Kindu prison was built in 1955 and held 136 detainees, including troops and policemen, before Tuesday's jailbreak. It has no large gates and is guarded by the police and the army.

At the end of June, the UN mission in DR Congo (MONUC) warned against the "recrudescence of mutinies and attempts to break out of prison," after the death of two people and sexual violence during a bid by jailed soldiers to break out of prison at Goma in the east.

MONUC staff blamed an increase in jailbreaks on "the recurrent lack of food supplies or health care for detainees (...) and the absence of an efficient penitentiary policy."

Jails in the DR Congo are particularly rundown and overcrowded, dating from the Belgian colonial era. Prisoners often live in disastrous hygienic conditions, prey to many diseases and to dehydration and malnutrition, even famine. It is possible to die of hunger or torture in a DR Congo jail.