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A barbaric prison in Africa is hell on Earth with people able to smell the stench of rotting flesh from dead corpses inside its walls as far as a mile away.
Inmates of the Rwanda prison Gitarama, one of the world's deadliest, are forced to eat the rotting corpses of other inmates in order to survive.
Rapists, robbers, murderers and some of the most violent criminals in the country lay inside its filthy and overcrowded walls โ but it's feared some of the inmates could be entirely innocent.
READ MORE: Fugitive Daniel Khalife snared by cops bringing huge four-day manhunt to an end
The unimaginable jail on the outskirts of Rwandaโs capital, Kigali, was built in 1960 as housing for British workers. It was later converted into a jail designed to hold around 400 prisoners at the time.
The troubling conditions mean inmates are often left with no choice but to stand due to a lack of space, with as many as 8,000 trapped inside despite the prison's capacity currently being somewhere between 1,300 and 3,000.
At its peak capacity, after the Rwandan genocide of the mid-1990s, the prison was estimated to hold closer to 50,000 inmates in squalid conditions.
More than 1,000 men are reported to have died in Gitarama in 1995 alone. Even today, the stink of faeces and rotting flesh is said to be detectable up to a mile away.
Reports state that multiple prisoners a day can die in the Gitarama jail due to the foul conditions. It's also been reported there is no sewer system meaning convicts must trawl barefoot through their own faeces or sleep soaked in sewage.
And with no medical care, health conditions take lives daily as do gangs who are free to commit brutal crimes against those who disagree with them. Many inmates in the prison are still awaiting trial.
Human rights organisations have protested against the deplorable conditions inside the jail over the decades but have failed to succeed in improving conditions.
Switzerland-based International Bridges to Justice is just one organisation that has campaigned to end the savage treatment of detainees inside the prison, some of whom have waited without trial for as long as 16 years.
It said: "Ordinary men, women and children facing charges can wait in legal purgatory indefinitely, with little if not no access to family, medical assistance, and legal counsel.
"Some have been imprisoned for 16 years without an expected date of trial. It does not have to be that way. We seek to decongest Gitarama Prison and ensure timely, fair trials for detainees."
With some of the inmates serving life sentences after having committed the most deplorable crimes (in some cases serving multiple life sentences) it's widely thought they have 'nothing to lose' so commit more heinous acts to earn respect from fellow criminals.
Lt-Col Charles Kayonga, commander of Gitarama in the mid-1990s, heartbreakingly admitted it was quite possible that some of the inmates were innocent.
โIt's possible some are innocent. I'm not saying our methods were always thorough," he said. "But the vast majority of these people are killers.โ
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