BRASILIA: The latest prison riot in northern Brazil is thought to have killed more than 30 people, some of them beheaded, officials said Sunday, tripling an earlier estimated death toll. "There are probably more than 30 dead" at the Alcacuz prison in the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte, police investigator Otacilio de Medeiros told reporters after leaving the jail. The bloodbath that erupted on Saturday night was the latest of several gruesome gang-related massacres this year in the country's overcrowded prisons. Officials said members of two separate drug gangs had come out of different parts of the prison and clashed violently. "There are at least three inmates dead because we were able to see their heads," state prisons manager Zemilton Silva told local media on Saturday.

Source: New Strait Times January 16, 2017 01:31 UTC