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| Iraq | ||
| Ten wounded in Tikrit prison riot | ||
| 2011-03-14 | ||
| TIKRIT, Iraq - At least five guards and five inmates were hurt when a riot erupted on Sunday in a prison in former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s home city of Tikrit, police and a provincial council member said. “We received ten wounded people, five policeman and five prisoners. Some of them were seriously wounded,” a police source at Tikrit hospital told Reuters. Another police source said some people had also been killed, although this could not be immediately confirmed. A senior police officer said the riot erupted after noon at the central prison for Salahuddin province, of which Tikrit is the capital. Prisoners set fire in cells that hold 650 inmates. “It is disobedience. Those prisoners, most of them from al-Qaeda and another armed insurgent groups, were planning to escape from the prison.” A Reuters correspondent at the scene, 150 km (95 miles) north of Baghdad, said a heavy deployment of Iraqi security forces had surrounded the prison.
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| Posted by:Steve White |