By Houda Mzioudet.
Tripoli, 30 November 2013:
Around 50 prisoners escaped from Sebha Central Prison on Thursday night/Friday morning, Issa Bossifi, former prison . . .[restrict]director has told the Libya Herald.
He said that the jailbreak appeared to have been the result of a vendetta between a number of prisoners and the Hasnawa tribe. These latter, he said, had issues with one of the prisoners and arrived at the prison with heavy weapons. They tired to break in, planning to kill him.
Responding to the attack, police at the gates guarding the jail, opened fire. In the ensuing chaos, inmates managed to escape, according to Mohamed Saleh, a local journalist with National Libyan Radio.
“This is the seventh jailbreak to take place in Sebha,” he noted.
Some prisoners handed themselves into the Sebha security directorate.
“They said they would return when the fragile security situation stabilises”, Salah added, quoting a police office whose brother escaped from the jail.
“Sebha prisons officers feel powerless with the chaos and fragile security in prisons,” he added.
In June an inmate was gunned down in his cell after guards apparently let in the killers. The murdered man, Ibrahim Al-Hasnawi died in a hail of bullets when the barricaded door of his cell was kicked down. There were unconfirmed reports that members of the Abu-Zahra family of the Awlad Sulaiman tribe were allowed into the prison by fellow tribesmen working there.
At the end of April, 170 prisoners broke out of the jail. The previous month, 50 others escaped following a riot.
[/restrict]
