Brazil prison gang leaders rounded up at gunpoint in massive crackdown on riots that have seen over 120 inmates killed and beheaded in just three weeks
BRAZILIAN convicts are pictured being moved from a notorious jail in response to growing prison violence that has killed at least 120 people since 1 January alone.
Prisoners including gang members are held at gunpoint as they are escorted from the Baldomero Cavalcanti de Oliveira Prison in Maceio to the new Agreste Maximum Security Penitentiary.
The transfer of 240 hardened criminals comes in response to two brutal killings in the prison last week.
That incident is one of several bouts of drug-related violence that has seen dozens beheaded and disembowelled in jails across the country.
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Another riot broke out Saturday night at the Alcacuz penitentiary near the northeastern city of Natal where a total of 26 prisoners were killed — many of them beheaded.
The cells were not closed for the night because the bars on them had been ripped off in a previous riot in 2015 and not replaced.
Dramatic photographs show police storming the prison on Sunday, where they continue to try to stem the unrest.
It was the third major massacre to hit Brazil's overcrowded jails this month, all of them thought to involve suspected drug gangs.
Gruesome violence at a prison in the northwestern city of Manaus killed about 60 inmates on January 1. Many prisoners were beheaded and mutilated.
A further 33 died in a riot in Roraima state on January 6.
The Natal massacre raised fears that the wave of violence could spread across the country.
";Authorities are playing a dangerous game by underestimating the scale" of the crisis in the prison system, said Renata Neder, a human rights adviser to Amnesty International in Brazil.
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