Several dozen wounded are also counted in this overcrowded prison, according to local authorities.
A fire that broke out on the night of Wednesday, Sept. 8, in an overcrowded Indonesian prison in the Jakarta region, left at least 41 dead and several dozen injured, local police said.
The fire broke out on Wednesday morning at a prison in Tangerang, a town west of the Indonesian capital. “Forty-one prisoners died, eight are seriously injured and 72 have more minor injuries.”Jakarta police chief Fadil Imran told reporters.
Firefighters were able to extinguish the fire that affected one of the prison’s buildings, mainly for inmates of drug trafficking or consumption, at around 3 am (local time).
Authorities are still investigating the causes of the fire but suspect an electrical problem. Tangerang prison housed two and a half times more inmates than expected (more than 2,000 instead of 600), according to data on the prison department’s website. The building that caught fire was also overcrowded, acknowledged the spokeswoman for the general directorate of prisons, Rika Aprianti. “The maximum capacity of Block C was 40 people, but it was used for 120 inmates”, she told Metro TV.