A model was killed during a brutal prison riot in which four people were beheaded by gangsters.
Joanna
Birriel was caught up in the melee which claimed the lives of a dozen
convicts – including Guatemala’s most influential prisoner.
The 24-year-old brunette was visiting former army officer Bryon Lima when violence broke out.
The
riot began when a fellow inmate threw a hand grenade at Lima,
imprisoned for the murder of a bishop bludgeoned to death with a
concrete block in 1998, and supporters protecting him attacked their
rivals with guns.
It was known an Argentine woman visitor had been killed, but her identify only emerged yesterday afternoon.
Officials said she visited Lima, who prosecutors claim built a
multimillion pound illegal prison empire based on threats and
corruption, once a month.
The former officer’s brother Luis
Alberto said the model, who moved to Guatemala with an Argentinian
boyfriend she later broke up with, had worked for them as an advisor for
a bio-health park company.
Joanna, who was born in the
north-eastern Argentinian province of Misiones, was initially identified
by local press as Bryon Lima’s girlfriend in what is thought to have
been an error.
Her current boyfriend, an agronomist, is also said to have worked alongside her.
It has not yet been revealed how she was killed, although four of the dead were decapitated.
The riot occurred at Granja Pavon Prison, 12 miles south east of the Guatemalan capital Guatemala City.
Officials have blamed the violence on feuding between Lima’s gang and a rival gang led by drugs trafficker Marvin Montiel Marin.
Marin was sentenced to 820 years in jail for the 2008 murder of 15
Nicaraguans and a Dutchman on a bus said to be carrying cocaine.
Lima’s
lawyer said he had reports from prison inmates that his client had
recently forbidden a rival gang from selling drugs in the prison where
he was serving his sentence for the bishop’s murder.
