BRAZIL PRISON BREAK: 40 INMATES ESCAPE AFTER WALL BLOWN UP

Rio de Janeiro (AFP) - Inmates in one of Brazil's roughest prisons used explosives to destroy a wall and escape en masse into surrounding streets, prompting a frantic manhunt.

Media footage of the brazen breakout on Saturday in the northeastern city of Recife showed the blast ripping a hole in the main wall around the Frei Damiao de Bozanno facility.

After a cloud of dust and debris clears, a stream of men dressed in ordinary clothing can be seen dashing into the narrow streets before police arrive on the scene.

Inside one of Brazil’s prisons, Desembargador Raimundo Vidal Pessoa, on June 25, 2015. After inmates escaped from Frei Damiao de Bozanno prison in Recife over the weekend, the prison’s guards union said it had warned that breakouts are likely to keep happening due to staff shortages.

After a police manhunt of the area, which lasted several hours, all but one of the prisoners was found. Police shot and killed two of the prisoners and a third man has been hospitalized, though it is not clear how he sustained his injuries. The recapturing of most of the prisoners marks a success of sorts for local police. Only a few days earlier, on Wednesday, 53 captives escaped from a prisonon the outskirts of Recife. Forty of those prisoners still remain at large.

Video material of the breakout shows the prisoners clambering out through the hole in the wall and running into neighboring streets, many of them into people’s houses, France 24 reports. The union for the prison’s guards said it had been warning officials for some time that a breakout was imminent. Due to staff shortages, only half of the complex’s observation towers were manned when the bomb went off.

The union has added that the wider Brazilian state of Pernambuco needs at least 5,000 guards to adequately monitor its prisons. Around 1,500 people are currently employed with many prisons electing inmates to help the guards ensure security. Frei Damiao de Bozanno is particularly hard to monitor because, like many of the prisons in Pernambuco state, it is severely overcrowded, holding four times as many prisoners as it should.

This was the second mass breakout in the same area in a week. Fifty-three inmates fled Wednesday from the Professor Barreto Campelo prison, near Recife, and by Sunday only 13 of them had been recaptured.

Escape attempts are frequent at Pernambuco prisons, the most overcrowded in Brazil. Facilities designed for 10,500 inmates maximum hold around 32,000 people, according to a 2015 study by Human Rights Watch.

Many prisoners have to sleep on the floor and there are so few guards that officials turn day-to-day control over to selected inmates who are given keys to the prison's interior, the report said.