MERVIN WEEKES so much feared for his life, that he hid behind the cell door of a friend, facing thick smoke and flames as rioting prisoners set about razing Glendairy Prisons.

Weekes, an inmate doing a 12-year term, and who was chief orderly on March 29, 2005, said he was "petrified" because he was considered an informer, and had heard angry prisoners asking where he was, as they set fire to cells.

The former St Philip resident informed commissioners he was considered a sell-out by inmates because as chief orderly he assisted staff in many administrative duties at the prison.

He said that before he took cover behind the
cell door, he had looked through a peep-hole and saw inmates throwing miniature molotov cocktails into individual cells. The inmates had been locked in but rioting prisoners somehow got a key, and released them before setting the fires.

Weekes recalled when the rioting inmates first came to the extension prison, they said: "We are burning down the place, and down here next."

It was then that locked-in prisoners shouted their disapproval, and the troublemakers eventually came back to open the cell doors and release more than 100 prisoners.

Weekes, due for release in April 2009, said that upon leaving that area a number of other buildings were on fire. He slept in the medical unit with a number of orderly officers and the next morning (March 30) around 9 a.m prisoners escaped from
a special cage and
started fires.