37 die in Nigerian prison cell as overcrowding, poor ventilation blamed

In the capital of Nigeria's Niger state, thirty-seven people — many of them teenagers drawn into illegal goldmining by poverty and criminal networks — suffocated in an overcrowded paramilitary holding cell, their pleas for air unanswered by guards. The deaths, initially obscured by official claims of disease, reveal the compounding cruelties of a resource-rich region where children labor in mines controlled by gangs, and where the machinery of law enforcement can become as lethal as the dangers it purports to address. What unfolded in Minna is not merely a story of institutional failure, but a