‘The anteroom to hell’: Over 120 killed and 59 injured in attempted escape from DRC’s largest prison

An attempted jail break from the Makala prison, the largest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), ended in the early hours of Monday morning with at least 129 inmates dead, 24 of them from gunshot wounds and the rest from suffocation or crushing, 59 wounded, and an unspecified number of female prisoners raped, according to Security Minister Jacquemain Shabani. In addition, fires lit during the escape attempt destroyed the offices, the infirmary, and the food store. The prison, designed to hold 1,500 people, houses some 14,000 inmates and the harsh living conditions inside have been criticized on numerous occasions.

The incident began at around 2 a.m. on Monday when residents around Makala heard gunfire coming from the prison, which is located south of the Congolese capital Kinshasa. The Interior Ministry has announced the opening of an investigation.

“The government is satisfied with the restoration of calm, deplores these tragic events, and offers its condolences to the families of the victims,” Shabani said in a public statement to the nation in which he also announced the meeting of a crisis cabinet with the security forces. In 2017, some 4,500 prisoners escaped from Makala following an attack organized by a nationalist sect to free their leader.

Minister of Justice Constant Mutamba described the escape attempt as “premeditated acts of sabotage,” while government officials were “traveling in the interior of the country to extend the policy of prison decongestion and the improvement of prison conditions.” He also said the ongoing investigations are aimed at identifying and severely punishing those responsible for the attempted jail break, who are expected to receive “an implacable response.” On Monday, the minister banned the transfer of any prisoners to Makala prison and assured that the project for the construction of a new facility on the outskirts of Kinshasa would be accelerated.

Speaking to the media, Deputy Minister of Justice Samuel Mbemba was highly critical of the country’s courts. “The first people responsible for all this are the magistrates who send even mere suspects to prison. In Congolese criminal law, freedom is the principle. Detention is an exception, which means that the prison is made, in principle, for the convicted [...] We are making efforts to ease overcrowding but every day there are contingents, vehicles of prisoners arriving, which nullifies the efforts made by the government to provide space in prison and for them to live in humane conditions.”

“How can we understand that a civilian prison built for 1,500 people now houses, according to estimates, 14,000? The prison is overcrowded, there are deaths every day. The international community cannot stand by and do nothing,” says Emmanuel Cole, a Congolese human rights activist. Last July, journalist Stanis Bujakera published several videos of the interior of the prison, which he recorded during a six-month incarceration, in which prisoners can be seen sleeping huddled together on the floors and in the toilets, with no room to move. “It is the anteroom to hell, a concentration camp where three or four people die every day,” he said of the prison’s living conditions.

In the days following Bujakera’s report, the Congolese government released hundreds of prisoners, many of whom were in pre-trial detention. However, new inmates were moved into the prison, which has not led to any real relief from overcrowding, according to Cole, who chairs the local branch of the Bill Clinton Peace Foundation. For his part, opposition leader Martin Fayulu strongly condemned “the brutal killing of prisoners in Makala prison.” “These summary executions are an unacceptable crime that cannot go unpunished. I demand that light be shed on this massacre and that those responsible be brought to justice. Respect for human life and dignity must prevail in the DRC,” he said on social media.

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