“There was a panic movement”: more than 200 detainees take advantage of an earthquake to escape a Pakistani prison

Fearing for their lives, they also took advantage of the circumstances to become beautiful. More than 100 prisoners are still fleeing this Tuesday, June 3 in southern Pakistan after more than 200 detainees from a Karachi prison took advantage of the seismic tremors to leave the night, local authorities report.

According to the minutes of the Malir prison in Karachi, which is accessed to the AFP, 216 prisoners escaped around 1:30 am at the end of the afternoon, “129 were still fleeing,” said information minister in the province of Sindh, Sharjeel Inam Memon.

A head of the dismissed prison authorities

A first shield that occurred around midnight aroused the fear of prisoners, terrified by the idea that the building collapses about them, said a Malir prison supervisor in the BBC.

There was a “panic movement” in the establishment, summarized to Sharjeel Inam Memon.

An hour and a half and several shaken later, chaos reigned, the detainees tried to break the barriers of the prison and deployed reinforcements of the troops to break the rebellion.

Police explained that they had responded to the beginning for warnings. “An inmate who was trying to flee was killed and another 12 were injured,” reports the prison report. Two police officers were also injured and the head of provincial prison authorities was dismissed following these events, said the Minister of Information.

Pakistani overpopulated prisons

Prisoners in Pakistan suffer from overcrowding of intense prison, abuse and precariousness in a country where the slowness of court keeps prisoners in preventive detention for a long time. Karachi prison in Malir is a perfect illustration: it is supposed to accommodate up to 2,200 detainees, it actually has at least 5,000, says the BBC.

Until a decade ago, the Pakistani Taliban and their allies Al-Qaeda were common in massive escapes in northern Pakistan. In 2013, more than 240 prisoners, including many jihadists, had escaped from a northwest prison. A year earlier, a similar attack had allowed the release of 400 detainees in the same province.