MAXIMUM security inmates at Truganina’s Port Phillip Prison set fire to mattresses wedged against their cell doors after a member of the Tiba family was escorted to isolation.
Brothers Bassam Tiba, 42, and Osman Tiba, 28, pleaded guilty in the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Thursday to arson after police charged them over fires in June that caused more than $2000 damage.
The court heard that prison officers in the maximum-security Charlotte wing were searching Bassam’s cell about 8am on June 9 when he swallowed what they believed to have been illegal pills.
Bassam, who was jailed for 10 years last year for stabbing Richard Haddara in Thomastown over an unpaid debt, was taken to the prison’s exclusion zone.
While being moved, he yelled to his brother in a foreign language, assumed to have been encouraging others to light fires. Fire broke out in Bassam’s cell in the exclusion area about 11am, started with a cigarette lighter and fuelled by clothing.
Smoke soon billowed from a mattress blocking the door. He was “aggressive and resisting” while prison staff forcibly removed him from his cell.
Half an hour later a blaze began in a plastic bin at the foot of the bed in his brother’s cell, believed to have been ignited by two boxes of matches. Two more fires began in other cells before all inmates in the Charlotte wing and exclusion placement area were evacuated.
Damage amounted to $500 per cell and the fire brigade callout cost more than $10,000, for which it sought $5000 restitution.
Bassam was put on a good behaviour bond for 18 months, Osman for 12 months. Each was ordered to pay $3000 in restitution.
