TEGUCIGALPA: Rival gangs staged a gunfight Thursday at a maximum security prison in Honduras, which makes a minimum of five people dead, police said.
Police have never been able to put in the prison since the situation remains too hazardous, said Yuri Mora, a spokesman for the prosecution department.
The gunfight involving associates of their Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha street gangs was unfolding from the prison at La Tolva, 40 km (25 miles) east of the capital Tegucigalpa.
A hospital in the capital said it’d confessed 15 injured people in the prison.
Countless distraught relatives of prisoners gathered in the hospital and away from the prison seeking advice on their nearest and dearest, press reports stated.
On social networking, sound of gunfire and explosions in the prison circulated.
Participants of Barrio 18 and also MS-13 control large regions around the outskirts of a few cities in Honduras as well as rural locations, and battle each other over land for drug trafficking, firearms, automobile theft and other offenses, police state.
The nation’s 28 overcrowded prisons home some 22,000 individuals are described by experts as being basically crime colleges, where murder, extortion, kidnappings and other offenses are arranged, supposedly with assistance from prison employees.
The nation’s worst prison disaster came from 2012 if a fire killed 362 people in a prison at Comayagua, 50 kilometers north of Tegucigalpa.
The government has built three new prisons such as the one in La Tolva in a bid to ease overcrowding from the Middle American nation’s aging and decrepit penal centres.