Man who spent nine years locked in one of world's deadliest prisons reveals the time he ‘came closest to death’
Pieter Tritton spent over nine years in two prisons in Ecuador
A man who spent almost a decade inside some of the worst prisons in Ecuador has revealed the closest he came to death.
Pieter Tritton fell into drug dealing when he was a teenager. A few years later and he went to prison for smuggling cocaine and amphetamines while at college.
Despite the stint behind bars, he struggled to leave his criminal career behind and began to profit from creating drug routes from Ecuador, importing cocaine disguised inside camping equipment.
In 2005, UK investigators uncovered his criminal activity and he ended up in one of the world's most deadly and unruly prisons, Quito.
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He was later transferred to another notoriously violent prison in the port city of Guayaquil and spent over nine years in total across both institutions.
After spending years witnessing extreme violence, illness and some of the most gruesome deaths possible, Tritton came close to death himself.
He spoke to LADbible about one incident in particular, in which a hit was sent out to his wing.
"One particular one that stands out, when a third gang came into the prison, that was it, that de-stabilized everything," he explained.
"They were called the Choneros and they are now probably Ecuador's principal gang.
"They end up on the wing that I'm on... the boss of the Choneros... I got on with him quite well, very well to be honest.
"I used to cook with them, have food with them, party with them, everything. I was still selling coke for them, you know, they were friends at the end of the day.
"And then the Cubanos started getting p****d off at the situation, feeling threatened by them, their presence. So the Cubanos sent in a hit team to our wing."
Tritton explained that the rival gang carried out the hit on a random evening, leading to hours of violence and death.
"We get locked into the wing at 5pm, I'm looking around the wing and I'm like, 'there's hardly anybody out in the wing this evening,'" he said.
"Normally all the doors are open, there's people getting high, there's loads of smoke and there's music playing.
"I said, 'there's something going on we don't know about'.
"Why's nobody out? What are these people doing that just come on the wing?
"So this guy that had come in to basically kill as many of the Choneros as he could... He sat up in a hammock by the main gate, with his little group of Comer Muertos, as they call them, who were contract killers."
Tritton explained he had been handing a plate to the former leader of the Choneros' right-hand man when it all kicked off.
"... Somebody comes up behind me, so behind my shoulder, and as I turned to walk away... the guy's fired from behind me over my shoulder," he explained, revealing that the bullet hit his fellow prisonmate straight in the face.
"And yeah I just ran. Normally, when people got killed there, it'd be like bang, bang, bang, someone's dead, and you'd come out and see," he said.
"This wasn't that, this was a full on attempt at killing the whole lot. And there's about 20 or 30 Choneros on the wing.
"So all hell breaks loose. There's bullets flying, there's things hitting my door. I'm thinking, they're gonna come through the door in a minute.
"Sometimes they come around with a petrol bomb to smoke you out.
"If you wouldn't open the door, they either smash the door down if they could or they'd throw a petrol bomb through that space and smoke you out, burn you out."
Tritton explained that the shoot out went on for two hours, while hand grenades were also being used in the bloody battle.
Following the incident, Tritton was transferred to Wandsworth Prison in the UK, which he described as like 'a holiday camp'.
Topics: Crime, Drugs, News, World News, UK News
Lucy Devine