Arizona has “refurbished” a prison’s gas chamber and purchased the ingredients necessary to create the same deadly chemical compound used by Nazis during the Holocaust.
The state’s Department of Corrections has bought more than $2,000 worth of ingredients to make hydrogen cyanide gas, according to documents obtained and published by The Guardian. That same type of gas was used by Nazis to murder more than one million prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau, and other death camps during World War II, including Jews, Poles, Roma, and prisoners of war. When it was used during WWII, the gas was known by the trade name “Zyklon B.”
Arizona has bought sodium hydroxide pellets and sulfuric acid, which produce the lethal gas. The Department of Corrections also spent $1,530 on a solid brick of poisonous potassium cyanide in December.
Arizona State Prison Complex, Florence, where the state’s gas chamber is located, has been out of commission for years after a botched execution in 1999 left a prisoner suffocating for 18 minutes before he finally died. The chamber was originally built in 1949.
Hellbound and Down 