A prison break is currently unfolding at Haiti’s only female prison.
“The situation is confirmed, there is a huge tension at the prison,” Pierre Rene, a Haiti National Police prison official told the Miami Herald.
Rene, who was hurried, did not provide any details. But multiple sources confirm that at least one police officer was injured and one prisoner died during the incident. Initial reports are that most of the women escaped from the facility located in Cabaret, just north of Port-au-Prince.
At the time of the incident, there were 230 females inside the prison.
A source monitoring the situation told the Herald that prisoners tied up security officers on duty and opened the gates. The nearby police station in Titanyen responded to the incident, but while officers were on their way, gang members from nearby Canaan attacked the police station and set it on fire.
A video showed several women running through the barren mountains of nearby Titanyen while the sound of gunshots can be heard in the background.
Human rights activists and others had been anticipating some kind of prison break inside the country’s penal system, as prisoners have been dying from malnutrition and a lack of drinking water, as well as diseases spreading inside the overcrowded prisons. But the concerns were mainly focused on the National Penitentiary near downtown Port-au-Prince and the Civil Prison in Croix-des-Bouquets, where a powerful gang has been wreaking havoc in the population for months.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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