2023-08-04 08:09:00
Photos and videos were released by inmates of Saint-Gilles prison. The images show a lot of waste where rats, sometimes large in size, swarm. “It’s not Club Med, but a real dump. We have specimens that almost reach the size of a beaver! They are everywhere,” testifies one of the prisoners to Sudinfo. “Tell it to your readers: it’s hell on earth here. We can no longer live in such conditions. It is totally inhuman, degrading”, he denounces.
The prison confirms the problem. “We used to see rats here and there, but the situation has never been so bad,” staff members told the Nieuwsblad. The Flemish daily also explains that the rodents relish the leftover food that the prisoners throw out the windows. “The waste reaches a meter high in some places. Between these heaps, it’s really crawling with rats. It’s dirty to see”, is it still specified.
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“We take the problem very seriously and we are trying to bring the situation under control with an extermination team, an external company. An internal team is trying to clean up the piles of rubbish, in the hope that the rat population will decrease,” said Valérie Callebaut, spokesperson for the prison administration.
Some 500 detainees are currently under the bars of Saint-Gilles prison. “The long-term plan is to close the prison at the end of next year. We hope to accommodate most of the inmates of Saint-Gilles in the new prison of Haren. This will be done in stages and it will take some time before Haren can operate at full capacity,” said Callebaut.
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