At least eighteen prisoners dead in Honduras jail riot
HONDURAS At least eighteen inmates have been killed and sixteen injured in overnight fighting between prisoners in Honduras’ northern port town of Tela, prison officials have said. The National Penitentiary Institute said on Saturday that 17 prisoners had died at the facility in Tela, about 200 kilometres (120 miles) from the capital Tegucigalpa, and one more died in hospital, with local media describing the unrest as gang violence. A prison spokesperson, Digna Aguilar, said authorities had to enter the area carefully “for fear of being among the victims” because several inmates had firearms, which slowed the investigation.
The combined national security force known as Fusina said that five ninemillimetre guns, as well as ammunition, had been seized from the inmates. Prison officials had originally reported only three deaths, but the toll quickly rose. Forensic workers placed the bodies in plastic bags and transported them to the judicial morgue of San Pedro Sula for autopsies. An AFP photographer at the scene saw shocked relatives arriving to claim the bodies. Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, grappling with a recent wave of prison killings, on Tuesday ordered the army and the police to take full control of the country’s 27 prisons, which are badly overcrowded with some 21,000 inmates. But as of Friday, the military had yet to take complete control of the Tela detention centre, according to Aguilar. On Saturday, top military officer General Tito Livio Moreno indicated that the military would be deployed in eighteen penal centres identified as “high risk”. Hernandez announced the crackdown after the killings on December 14 of five members of feared gang Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) by a fellow detainee at the high-security prison in La Tolva, 40km (25 miles) east of Tegucigalpa. That came just a day after Pedro Idelfonso Armas, the warden of El Pozo the country’s main highsecurity prison, in the western city of Santa Barbara was shot dead in the south of the country.
(Al Jazeera)