Honduras prison fire worst ever?

Perhaps the deadliest prison fire in history has claimed the lives of at least 300 inmates at Comayagua in Honduras.    A further 56 of the 853 prisoners are still missing.

The fire broke out late on Tuesday night, and it took more than an hour before it was brought under control.  The cause is still unknown.  Dozens of prisoners died trapped in their cells while police fired tear gas at relatives who tried to force their way in. 

Firefighters say they were unable to free inmates because they did not have keys to their cells and they could not find the guards who did.  The Honduran President has promised a 'full and transparent' investigation.

The disaster looks set to become the deadliest prison fire ever.    The worst until now happened in America’s Ohio State Penitentiary at Columbus, where more than 320 inmates were killed in 1930.

(see also my blog of Dec 9, 2010)

Bali bombings - latest suspect on trial

A 45 year old Javanese man has gone on trial in Jakarta for allegedly helping to make the bombs that killed more than 200 people in two night clubs in Bali in 2002.    Umar Patek was captured in the same town in Pakistan where the Americans tracked down Osama bin Laden.

He is also charged with involvement in a series of bombings in churches in Jakarta that killed 18 people.   If convicted, he could face the death penalty.

The prosecution claim Patek was recruited for the attack by Imam Samudra and Abdul Matin, better known as Dulmatin.   Samudra was executed in 2008, along with Ali Ghufron and Amrozi Nurhasyim, dubbed the ‘smiling assassin’ because of his demeanour at his trial, while Dulmatin was killed in a police ambush in 2010.   

It is alleged that Patek spent three weeks mixing the explosives in a rented house in Bali’s capital, Denpasar, then helped another bombmaker, Dr Azahari bin Husin, to assemble a huge van-bomb.    Husin was killed by Indonesian police in 2005.

The growing cost of disasters

The Economist ran a fascinating piece in its January 14 edition on the growing cost of disasters.   Five of the ten most expensive disasters in history have happened in the last four years, and a leading reinsurer, Munich Re, reckoned 2011 was the most costly year in its history.

The most expensive disaster ever is last year’s Japanese tsunami, followed by Japan’s Kobe earthquake of 1995, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.   Most expensive does not mean highest number of casualties.      The Japanese tsunami cost fewer than 16,000 lives, Kobe 6,400 and Katrina 1,300, compared with a quarter of a million killed in the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, and perhaps a similar number in the Haiti earthquake of 2010.

One reason for the growing cost of disasters is that there are more and more human beings around to suffer losses.   The population of hurricane-belt state Florida, for example, has risen from 2.8m in 1950 to 19m now.

And overall human beings are getting richer so there are more things to be destroyed, while sometimes not enough thought is given to where development takes place.   Thailand’s growing industries, for instance, have been located in areas known to be vulnerable to flooding.

Football disasters

At least 74 people have been killed and hundreds injured in a riot after a football match between two of Egypt’s top teams - Port Said’s al-Masry and Cairo’s al-Ahly (flag pictured above).   Al-Masry won the game, and at the final whistle their fans invaded the pitch and attacked rival players and supporters, while part of the stadium was set on fire.

Although some rioters were said to have been armed with knives and metal bars, most injuries appear to have been caused by a stampede of spectators desperate to escape from the ground.

Some observers are claiming that the normal police presence for a match of this kind had been scaled down, and there are theories that there may have been some kind of concerted attack on al-Ahly fans, who are seen as having been in the forefront of recent protests against the security forces.

The world’s worst football disaster came in Lima in 1964, when a goal was disallowed in the last minute of an Olympic qualifying match between Peru and Argentina.   More than 300 people died as a riot in the stadium spread into the centre of the city.     There too, many of those killed were crushed trying to escape the trouble.

(See also my blogs of February 6 and March 30, 2009, January 2, 2010.)

Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters 20 - the Fall of Singapore

For Winston Churchill, it was ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’.   Before World War Two, Britain had spent the then vast sum of £60m turning the island of Singapore into a supposedly impregnable fortress at the end of the Malayan peninsula – at that time also a British colony.

On December 8, 1941, the Japanese landed at the northern end of the peninsula, and though they were heavily outnumbered, they fought their way down it remorselessly, until by the end of January 1942, they had conquered the whole peninsula without the British scoring a single significant victory.

Now the defenders blew up the causeway that linked Singapore to the mainland, but on February 8, the Japanese launched an invasion.   Just as they had in Malaya, they outfought and outmanoeuvred the defending forces, using their air supremacy to deadly effect.

Just a week later, 85,000 British and British Empire forces surrendered to the 35,000 Japanese invaders.    The Japanese had lost only 3,500 men in the conquest of Malaya and Singapore – then the greatest city in south-east Asia.

Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters 19 - Dunkirk

Just 21 years after the end of World War One (see my blog of Jan 22), the British army was back in France to fight the Germans.     This time the problem was not a bloody stalemate, but the speed and daring of enemy forces who completely outmanoeuvred the Allies.

In May 1940, German panzers attacked through the Ardennes, and advanced 200 miles in just 10 days, reaching the Channel coast, and cutting off the British Expeditionary Force in northern France.   There followed a series of desperate rearguard actions as Lord Gort’s army tried to secure a line of retreat to the ports.

Many French and British soldiers fought bravely, as Boulogne was surrendered, then Calais fell, while Belgium’s capitulation left a dangerous gap in the Allied line.    In the end, Dunkirk was the only port left, and even that was under constant German attack.

There then followed the most successful part of the whole operation, with nearly 200,000 British and 140,000 French and Belgian troops rescued from the beaches.    But Churchill recognised the campaign overall had been a ‘colossal military disaster’.   The BEF had lost almost all its equipment, and 66,000 men had been killed, wounded or captured.

Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters 18 - the Somme

On Saturday, 1 July, 1916, British, British Empire and French soldiers launched a huge offensive on the Somme.    By the end of that day, nearly 20,000 British soldiers were dead, and 36,000 wounded – the worst toll for a single day in the history of the British Army.

When rotten weather and cloying mud finally brought an end to the Battle of the Somme in November, Britain and the British Empire had suffered an almost unimaginable 400,000 casualties, the French had lost about 200,000, and the Germans perhaps 450,000.

Of all the disasters featured in this series, this is the only one sometimes claimed as a victory.   It is said that this bloody attrition fatally drained German resources and paved the way for the Allies to finally win the war two years later.

The ground gained was negligible.   Nowhere did the Allied line advance more than six miles, and many objectives due to be taken on the first day were never captured, nor did the Allies liberate a single town or gain a single strategically significant point.