Inmates Flee Brazil Prison; Hostages Include Cardinal

Knife-brandishing inmates overpowered guards and seized Cardinal Aloisio Lorscheider, a cleric who was once regarded as a candidate for the papacy, in a prison uprising Tuesday in Fortaleza, a city on Brazil’s northeastern coast, police said.

Two inmates died in a shootout during the hostage-taking, and at least two prison guards were wounded, authorities said.

After 12 hours of tense negotiations, police agreed to provide weapons and a getaway car and turn off the lights outside the prison in exchange for the release of most of their 12 hostages, including Lorscheider.

But the 11 inmates left only one hostage--a wounded prison guard--behind when they departed the maximum-security Paulo Sallasate Prison.

“The cardinal and the other hostages are in great danger,” said police Sgt. Luis Gonzaga da Costa Neto by telephone from Fortaleza. “These men are heavily armed and have broken their word.”

Police said the trouble began around 11:45 a.m. Tuesday when the inmates jumped prison guards, wrestled away their weapons and grabbed Lorscheider and others who were visiting the prison at the invitation of a church commission.

A Brazilian television crew filming the visit showed one prisoner pouncing on Lorscheider. He held a knife to his neck, then threw him to the ground, while others overpowered guards and took hostages. Besides Lorscheider, the prisoners were holding two auxiliary bishops, a federal legislator, Roman Catholic lay workers, a policeman and two photojournalists.

Authorities feared for the health of the cardinal, who is 69 and has undergone cardiac bypass operations. Despite the initial scuffle and hours of tension-filled negotiations that followed, he was unharmed, police said.

Though uprisings are frequent in Brazil’s troubled prison system, rarely has there been such an illustrious hostage.

Lorscheider, one of five active Brazilian cardinals, has long been an important voice in the Brazilian Conference of Bishops; he twice has served as president of the group, which is the largest in the Catholic world with 373 bishops. He is now archbishop of Fortaleza, a city of 1.8 million and the capital of Ceara state.

A powerfully built man with a surprisingly soft voice and snow-white hair, Lorscheider, of Brazilian-German descent, became a bishop in 1962 and was named cardinal in 1976. He was widely regarded as a strong candidate for Pope in 1978 after the death of Paul VI. But Lorscheider was excluded then because of his fragile health, and John Paul I succeeded Paul VI.

Lorscheider rose to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he spoke against the hard-line military regime that ruled Brazil. A champion of the poor and a critic of the dictatorship, he received several death threats and was briefly jailed by the military in 1968.

Lorscheider was visiting the Fortaleza prison in part to investigate reports of abuse against several of its 485 inmates.