At least ten people were killed during a mass escape of thousands of inmates at the Pénitencier National, Haiti’s largest prison, in the capital Port-au-Prince, overnight Saturday into Sunday, an AFP reporter found and an NGO said.

“We count many dead bodies of prisoners,” Pierre Esperance, executive director of the National Network for the Defense of Human Rights (Réseau national de défense des droits humains, RNDDH), told the agency, explaining that only about a hundred prisoners remained in the prison on Sunday, out of about 3,800 who were incarcerated there before the attack by heavily armed gangs.

An AFP journalist who went to the scene yesterday morning saw at least ten bodies around the prison. Some of the victims had obvious bullet wounds, the reporter noted.

He was able to enter the prison, the gate of which was “open” and see that there was “hardly anyone” inside the detention center.

On the night of Saturday into Sunday, police officers “attempted to repel an attack by criminal gangs against the Pénitencier National and Croix des Bouquets (prison),” Prime Minister Ariel Henri’s government said in a statement.

“This attack on the detention centers caused many injuries among the prisoners and the staff of the prison administration,” he added.

The government denounced the raids by “heavily armed criminals who wanted at all costs to free prisoners, mainly for kidnapping, murder and other serious crimes” and “did not hesitate to execute citizens, set fire to and loot private and public property”.

It remains unclear at this stage how many inmates were able to escape from the Croix de Bouquet prison, noted Pierre Esperance.

Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, remains mired in a serious political, humanitarian and security crisis, exacerbated by the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in 2021. Armed gangs have taken control of much of the territory.