At least five prisoners died and fifteen others were injured in a shootout Thursday, June 17 between members of the Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gangs in the high security prison of La Tolva in Honduras, the prosecution said. .
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"The prosecutor's office informed us that there were at least five dead but that neither they nor the scientific police had been able to enter the prison because the incident was continuing,"
he told the AFP Yuri Mora, spokesperson for the prosecution.
"Security is not assured to enter to carry out checks"
, he added while local media reported the dispatch of police and soldiers to reinforce the security agents of the penitentiary establishment, located about forty kilometers east of Tegucigalpa.
The Escuela public hospital, in the Honduran capital, released a list of fifteen people with gunshot wounds who arrived in ambulances.
Several hundred relatives of prisoners converged on the health center and in front of the prison to try to find out more, including the identity of the prisoners concerned, local press reported.
Audio recordings were posted on social media showing gunfire and explosions which, according to witnesses, lasted for more than an hour.
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The Barrio 18 and MS-13 gangs control many suburbs of some major cities of the country as well as rural areas and compete to expand their respective territories, where they engage in drug and arms trafficking, the theft of vehicles and other crimes, according to police sources. The twenty-eight prisons in Honduras, which number around 22,000 prisoners, have been qualified by experts as “academies of crime” from which, among other things, assassinations, extortions and kidnappings are ordered with the complicity of the guards. The worst incident in a Honduran prison occurred in February 2012 with the death of 362 people in a fire in the Comayagua detention center, about 50 kilometers from Tegucigalpa.
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