Deaths, Fees and Fear: Somalia’s Prisons in 2024

By Ismail Abukar | Organization for Prisoners’ Rights (OPR) | 27 September 2024

• OPR’s 2024 assessment counted 2,287 convicted prisoners at Mogadishu Central Prison and 1,105 held awaiting trial (on remand), 137 verified deaths in Mogadishu’s prisons since 2019, and found that 45 percent of reported gender-based violence incidents in 2024 occurred in detention facilities.
• On July 13, an armed fight between al-Shabaab inmates and guards at Mogadishu Central Prison killed five prisoners and three soldiers.
• OPR’s multi-prison evaluation found that families and elders were using prisons as default places to hold relatives with severe mental health conditions, where untrained guards used restraints and solitary confinement.
• The National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA) changed directors in April. As far as I can establish, the change did not open its detention sites to inspection.

Four years after COVID-19 reached Somalia, the pandemic-era problems (overcrowding, absent healthcare, restricted family contact) were still the defining features of the system, and the counts had grown.

OPR’s 2024 assessment counted 2,287 convicted prisoners at Mogadishu Central Prison (2,097 men, 37 women and 153 boys) and 309 at the Mogadishu Prison and Court Complex, with 1,105 people on remand at the central prison: 987 men, 29 women and 89 boys. A year earlier the central prison held 1,929 convicted prisoners and 953 on remand, so the convicted population rose about 19 percent and the remand population about 16 percent. OPR found 102 prisoners who had completed their sentences and remained inside, up from 47, though it could not verify either figure. At Godka Jilacow, an underground prison run by NISA, it recorded 113 political prisoners, up from 98, and 198 people linked to al-Shabaab, and it counted 298 detainees in 18 district police stations, up from 234, and 83 at the Criminal Investigation Directorate (CID) headquarters.

OPR verified 137 deaths in Mogadishu’s prisons and detention facilities since the start of 2019, up from 104 a year earlier. It also said violent escape attempts by al-Shabaab-affiliated inmates between 2020 and 2024 contributed to at least 76 further deaths in confrontations with correctional officers.

Access to family, food and care was unchanged or worse. OPR’s 2024 report repeats the 2023 findings: visits suspended for over a year (the same duration and the same lack of a stated start date as in the 2023 report, where I place the start at around January or February 2022 — see Part 4 for what that ambiguity does and doesn’t establish), a $20 charge where they happened, $5 for ten minutes of fresh air, a prison-run restaurant, and solitary confinement for prisoners who refused to buy food. It adds that inmates were also made to buy drinking water, that donations from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) were withheld unless paid for, that hygiene was judged unacceptable in 80 percent of facilities, and that tuberculosis was resurging with no isolation for patients. A doctor at De Martino General Hospital, quoted by OPR, described diarrhoea and cholera outbreaks with multiple deaths and 38 hospitalisations.

OPR also tracked gender-based violence. Women, adolescents, girls and children accounted for about 95 percent of survivors reporting GBV between 2020 and 2024, and roughly 75 percent of them came from displaced communities. In 2024, 45 percent of reported incidents occurred in detention facilities specifically, and OPR found a rise in sexual violence against children captured in anti-al-Shabaab operations.

Read next to the pandemic record, this is a two-step shift. In 2020, prisoners depended on family and clan for basic supplies because the state provided too few. By 2024, the shortage had become a market inside the prison itself.

On July 13, al-Shabaab inmates at Mogadishu Central Prison obtained weapons and fought guards. The Custodial Corps said five prisoners and three soldiers died, and no prisoners escaped. The prison chief was suspended and an eight-member committee was appointed to investigate, according to a summary of the incident.

It was the second armed attack of this kind at the same prison since 2020. In August 2020 an inquiry found that weapons had been smuggled in two days before the fighting. In 2024, as in 2020, reporting at the time said it was unclear how inmates obtained weapons. A prison that cannot control what enters it cannot guarantee anyone’s safety inside.

OPR’s multi-prison evaluation, carried out at Baidoa and Mogadishu Central Prisons among others, found that families and clan elders used prisons as default places to hold relatives with severe mental health conditions, because Somalia has almost no public mental health services. When these prisoners showed disturbed behaviour, guards without medical training used heavy restraints, permanent shackling and indefinite solitary confinement, in cells that no medical staff monitored. Isolation of prisoners with mental disabilities is something the Nelson Mandela Rules prohibit when it would worsen their condition.

This is a COVID legacy in one specific sense: the fear, isolation and loss of contact of the pandemic years fell hardest on people with the least capacity to bear them, and the system had nothing to offer them but a cell.

In April, Abdullahi Mohamed Ali “Sanbalolshe” replaced Mahad Salad as NISA director. Human rights groups had warned in 2023 that the agency’s law allowed it to run detention facilities without specifying where, and nothing in the change of director opened those facilities to independent inspection.

By the end of 2024, no measure I can find showed a return to pre-pandemic conditions, let alone improvement on them. Where OPR has figures, they show more verified deaths, more convicted and remand prisoners, more people held beyond their sentences, and more of the cost of survival passed to prisoners and their families.

OPR calls for an immediate end to fees and informal charges for food, water, visits and medical care; independent health and mortality reporting for every prison, published annually; community mental health care so that families are not forced to use prisons; a ban on prolonged solitary confinement and restraint of prisoners with mental disabilities; and an independent, published inquiry into how weapons entered Mogadishu Central Prison in 2020 and 2024.

About the author

Ismail Abukar is an independent investigative journalist and Chairperson of the Organization for Prisoners’ Rights (OPR), an independent nonprofit based in Mogadishu. He holds an MA in International Law and Human Rights from UPEACE. [email protected]

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