(20 Feb 2012)
Apodaca Prison, Salinas Victoria
1. Wide of prison entrance
2. Mid of police vehicles entering prison
3. Various of people standing outside prison
4. Various of prison as seen through fence
5. Wide of ambulance inside grounds
6. Wide of people waiting outside prison
7. Wide of police vehicles on prison grounds
8. Pull out from people entering prison to wide of prison
Monterrey
9. Mid of officials at news conference
10. Mid of pictures of various escaped inmates being shown on screen
11. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Rodrigo Medina, Governor of Nuevo Leon:
"We can confirm that during the riot inside the prison, a group of inmates escaped from the facility."
12. Mid of pictures of various escaped inmates being shown on screen
13. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Rodrigo Medina, Governor of Nuevo Leon:
"It was the complicity of some authorities inside the prison that explains the time and manner in which this escape took place."
14. Wide of officials leaving news conference
STORYLINE
Imprisoned members of the hyper-violent Zetas drug cartel stabbed and bludgeoned 44 members of the rival Gulf cartel to death and then staged a mass escape, apparently with the help of prison authorities, officials in northern Mexico said on Monday.
Families of prisoners protested outside the Apodaca prison because they say they were not given information on the identity of the victims.
Only 10 of the dead had been identified by late afternoon.
Rodrigo Medina, governor of the northern state of Nuevo Leon, said the prison's director and three other officials have been fired and are under investigation for purportedly helping in the escape. 18 prison guards have been given the same punishment.
"It was the complicity of some authorities inside the prison that explains the time and manner in which this escape took place," said Medina.
Medina did not say how the escape was carried out, but he noted that no members of any gang had broken into the prison to spring their colleagues, as has happened at other Mexican prisons. Nor were any firearms smuggled into the facility. All of the deaths apparently occurred with blunt instruments or improvised knives.
Medina confirmed that all 30 escaped inmates were linked to the Zetas cartel, a brutal gang founded by deserters from an elite Mexican military unit.
He did not say what crimes the escaped inmates had been convicted of, but said 25 of the 30 were in the prison on federal charges, which often involve drug trafficking or illegal weapons possession.
Medina offered a reward of 10 (m) million pesos (almost 800,000 U.S. dollars) for information leading the arrest of those involved in the mass escape.
Medina did not say whether the riot and murders were carried out to cover up the jailbreak, but said the mass escape appeared to have been planned, and may have involved help from authorities at a specific point along the prison perimeter, known as Tower Six.
The Zetas and Gulf cartels were allies before splitting in 2010 and they have been fighting turf battles in Monterrey and elsewhere in northeastern Mexico.
All 2,500 inmates in the prison were incarcerated for federal crimes, and as many as 70 percent had yet to be convicted. The inmate population there grew by 1,500 in the last year to 180 percent of capacity, the result of a crackdown on organised crime and drug trafficking in the last year.
Deadly fights happen periodically in Mexico's prisons as gangs and drug cartels stage jail breaks and battle for control of penitentiaries, often with the involvement of officials. Sunday's riot was one of the deadliest so far.
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