Zimbabwe has appealed for help for its prisoners after a documentary exposed horrific conditions in the countrys jails, the films producer says, according to BBC online Thursday.
Shot secretly over months, a South African TV documentary reveals how dozens of inmates in Zimbabwe die every day of starvation and disease. Several of those featured in the film, which was aired on Tuesday, have died.
In the SABC documentary, prisoners described how the sick and healthy slept side-by-side in unhygienic and overcrowded cells. The film also showed how prison staff had converted cells to “hospital wards” for the dying.
It said makeshift mortuaries had been built within the prison grounds, where bodies of inmates “rotted on the floor with maggots (maddiker) moving all around”.
Last year, the Zimbabwe Association for Crime Prevention and Rehabilitation of the Offender said in a report that the Southern African countrys 55 prisons had the capacity to hold some 17.000 inmates, but it was estimated that more than 35.000 people were behind bars.
