At least 68 people died when a fire erupted during a riot at a jail in the northern Venezuelan city of Valencia, the attorney general said late Wednesday.

Tormented relatives yesterday waited for officials to turn over the remains of their loved ones and demanded accountability from officials.  The fast-moving fire swept through a station where prisoners were being kept in crowded cells, becoming one of the worst jail catastrophes in Venezuela’s history.

The announcement came hours after crowds of anguished family members had gathered outside the facility, some weeping and others facing off with police officers in riot gear. The Venezuelan news media reported that the police used tear gas. Officials had released little information throughout the day.

Venezuela chief prosecutor Tarek William Saab announced on Twitter that 66 men and two women had been killed. He said four prosecutors were being assigned to determine what happened and who was responsible for the tragedy in Valencia, a town in Carabobo state 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of Caracas, the capital.

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He promised a “thorough investigation to immediately shed light on the painful events that have put dozens of Venezuelan families in mourning.” The facility, attached to a police station, had a capacity of about 60 detainees, workers at the scene said. But Venezuela’s prisons are chronically overcrowded, with crumbling facilities and a shortage of personnel.

A Window to Freedom, a nonprofit group that monitors conditions at Venezuela’s jails and prisons, said preliminary but unconfirmed information indicates a riot began when an armed detainee shot an officer in the leg. Shortly after that a fire broke out, with flames growing quickly as the blaze spread to mattresses in the cells, it said. Rescuers apparently had to break a hole through a wall to free some of the prisoners inside.

Photos shared by the group showed prisoners being taken out on stretchers, their limbs frozen in awkward positions as their skin peeled off from the flames.

A report by the Venezuelan Prisons Observatory issued before the blaze found that in the first two months of 2018, 26 prisoners had died and more than 1,000 were participating in hunger strikes.