November 2, 2002	Saturday	Sha’aban 26,1423

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RABAT, Nov 1: Forty-nine people were killed and some 40 injured when a fire ravaged a jail 200 kilometres south of Rabat, the Moroccan capital, on Thursday night.

Many of the dead in the blaze at Sidi Moussa prison, on the outskirts of El Jadida, were inmates who had died of smoke inhalation.

The fire, said to be the worst ever in Morocco’s overcrowded prisons, broke out in one of the jail wings and smoke quickly filled three other sectors.

Eight of the people injured in the blaze were in a coma at a hospital where all other victims were taken.

Abderrahim Jamai, the head of the Moroccan prisons observatory (OMP), a non-governmental organization with representatives from several human rights groups, said the blaze was the worst ever in a Moroccan prison.

In August, two inmates were killed and another 20 injured when a fire caused by an electrical short circuit broke out in another prison north of Rabat.

Sidi Moussa has a capacity for 1,000 prisoners but housed more than 1,300.

The prison population in Morocco has nearly doubled in the past 10 years, swelling from 31,230 detainees in 1991 to more than 57,300 last year, Hassan Hamina, a prison administrator, said.—AFP