Article content continued

[np-related]

It was one of the worst prison fires ever in Latin America.

“We heard screaming from the people who caught on fire,” one prisoner told reporters, showing the fingers he fractured in his escape from the fire. “We had to push up the roof panels to get out.”

The director of the Organization of American States said Wednesday he was sending a delegation to Honduras to investigate the cause of the fire.

Jose Miguel Insulza expressed dismay over the deadly blaze, the worst at any prison in the world in the past decade, as he launched an OAS probe into the “dramatic events” at the overcrowded prison in central Honduras.

Survivors described wrenching scenes of inmates clutching each other in desperation while being engulfed by choking smoke and flames, in what is the world’s deadliest prison blaze in a decade.

“They tried to save themselves by hurling themselves into the shower, sinks” and any other source of water they could find, one survivor said.

“We are pulling out bodies,” said prisons director Danilo Orellana about the fire in the country’s overcrowded prison system that also left score of inmates injured.

“The situation is serious. Most have suffocated,” Orellana said of the fatalities, adding that the fire did not appear to have been caused by a riot.

Radio reports said the dead and missing totalled 402 people — almost half the prison’s inmates.

Lucy Marder, head of forensic services in Comayagua, said police reported that one of the dead was a woman who stayed overnight and the rest were prisoners, but she said some of the presumed dead could have escaped.