Four dead in latest Brazilian prison riot

Four prisoners were killed, and one of them beheaded, in the latest of a string of riots at a Brazilian penitentiary, officials said today.
Nine other inmates managed to use the riot to escape from the prison in the central state of Goias, and four were still at large today.
The violence broke out last afternoon, with inmates torching the administration building and destroying a security vehicle in the city jail of Jussara, which housed 77 inmates.
"The workers serving dinner were overpowered. The prisoners killed four inmates. Two of them were burned and one was beheaded," Goias prison authorities said in a statement.

"Nine prisoners fled and took weapons from guards," it added, noting that five of them had been recaptured within 24 hours.
Fighting broke out among prisoners from rival criminal gangs, officials said.

Most prisons in Brazil are badly overcrowded and turf wars between rival drug gangs are common.
Such fights have left 140 prisoners dead since the start of the year, with mass killings carried out in jails in the states of Amazonas, Roraima and Rio Grande do Norte.
Brazil has some 6,22,000 people behind bars in 2,766 detention facilities, the fourth largest prison population in the world. Most are kept in run-down, unsanitary jails.

In June, seven adolescents were killed at a riot in a youth detention center in the northeast of the country.