More than 250 hostages, including 214 women and dozens of children, have been released by prisoners at a high-security prison after the inmates ended their uprising, justice officials said.
"All the hostages have been freed" at the Viana prison, the spokesman said on Monday for the state justice secretariat of Espiritu Santo state, where rioting prisoners seized members of visiting families on Saturday to protest prison conditions.
The spokesman insisted that the prisoners "got nothing" from the state to end the uprising. The prisoners had demanded the return to their facility of five inmates transferred to a federal penitentiary a month earlier.
Two prisoners were killed in the uprising, one of them decapitated, and their bodies displayed on a wall outside the prison unit, officials confirmed earlier.
On Sunday night, rebellions at two other prisons in the same state were quashed. At a prison in Vila Velha, an inmate died of asphyxiation last Wednesday, the first day of that uprising.
The uprisings came nearly a month after some 170 people were killed, including scores of police, in a coordinated rebellion by a prison-based gang in Sao Paulo state just south of Espiritu Santo.
The gang unleashed a bloody street offensive, attacking police in retaliation over the transfer of some gang leaders to remote prisons.
{{/usCountry}}The gang unleashed a bloody street offensive, attacking police in retaliation over the transfer of some gang leaders to remote prisons.
{{/usCountry}}The Catholic Church says a prison mutiny occurs every 36 hours in Brazil amid overcrowding in the country's jails.