By Politico staff writer
Prison authorities in Sierra Leone have imposed a ban on a local watchdog over a report on a deadly prison riot last year.
The riot at the main maximum-security prison, the Freetown Correctional Center, better known by its original name as Pandemba Road prison has been described as the deadliest in the history of prison unrest in the country.
Prison Watch, which monitors prison conditions in the country, has not made its report public yet. The organization had sent a copy of the report to the prison management for their response before publication, when it got the ban notice.
The 29th April, 2020 Pandemba Road prison riots led to the deaths of multiple people. Official report put the death toll at 30. But many rights Campaigners believe the number could be higher, due to the secrecy with which the government initially handled the incident.
A spokesman for the prisons confirmed the ban, noting that it was imposed "until further notice."
Leslie Cole-Showers, Public Relations Officer of the Sierra Leone Correctional Services (SLCS), said Prison Watch allegedly falsifying its report.
"They formulated a falsified report about the April 29th incident in Pademba Road. They claimed that we buried dead bodies in the centre, after we opened our centre to series of investigations by the CID, and some human rights organizations, including Prisons Watch. They could not find anything of that sort," he said.
Mr. Cole-Showers added that the actual facts of the incident were already in the public domain, noting that if they had fabricated the facts relatives of "supposed missing inmates" would have come up with complaints.
The riots attracted both local and international attention.
The government had blamed opposition politicians of masterminding it, while the opposition said the government staged it with the intention to assassinate a top opposition figure, former Defense Minister Alfred Palo Conteh, who was at the time incarcerated in the overcrowded facility which is located in the west end of Freetown.
Conteh's wife was charged in court for her alleged role in planning the riot.
Both official and independent reports, including one by the global rights watchdog Amnesty International, have partly blamed the fear of Covid-19 for fueling the riot. The prison had just recorded a case of the viral pandemic and prisoners were reportedly worried about lack of preventive measures in place in the facility which was initially built to accommodate 324 inmates, but which held over 1000 people at the time of the riot, according to an official report.
The confirmation of a Covid-19 case in the facility led the prison authorities to impose movement restrictions, a decision that they said sparked an angry protest by the inmates, the report found.
Among many other factors, the report also noted that staff shortage at the facility prevented the prison authorities from providing adequate security for it, leading to escalation of the violence.
Properties worth millions of Leones were destroyed, as inmates reportedly held prison warding’s hostage during the riot.
The report claims that after the police failed to put the riot under control, the military was called in.
But while the government insist in the report that the military used "reasonable force" to control the riot, some campaigners and the opposition contended that the prisoners were shot at indiscriminately.
There were also suggestions that the presidential guard was deployed to execute the operation.
Calls for an independent, judge-led investigation into what exactly happened fell on deaf ears.
Prison Watch said Wednesday it has given the prison management two weeks to respond, after which it will publish its report even without official approval.
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Copyright © 2021 Politico Online 15/03/21
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