14-year-old girl used as sex slave in Brazilian prison

A 14-year-old Brazilian girl says she was raped by multiple men at a prison in the Amazonian state of Para

Para's governor suspended the warden and 20 guards at the Santa Izabel Penal Colony pending an investigation of the charges, authorities said Monday.

The prison, located about 50 km from Belem, the state capital, currently holds around 350 male inmates.

The teenage girl went to police last Saturday to report the crime and alert authorities that two other girls were still being held at the penal colony.

"She said she lost count of the number of men who raped her," Benilson Silva, a children's services official in the city of Santa Izabel, told the media.

The alleged victim said a woman approached her on the beach last week in Belem with an offer of domestic employment in Santa Izabel.

When she and two other girls recruited by the same woman arrived in Santa Izabel, they were driven to the prison farm, forced to consume drugs and alcohol and then sexually assaulted by various men, the alleged victim said.

The girl went to police after escaping from the penal colony in the early hours of Saturday.

"We are investigating who that woman (the recruiter) is. The entire investigation is under judicial seal because we want to establish everything that happened, who took her (the alleged victim), who abused her and who allowed the minor to enter the prison," police inspector Fabiano Amazonas said.

This kind of thing is not unprecedented in Para, where in 2007 a 16-year-old girl was repeatedly raped during a 26-day stay in a police lock-up.

Police in that case said they put the girl in a cell with men because the jail lacked separate women-only facilities.