Prison gang violence leaves 14 dead in El Salvador: Official
Clashes between two factions of a notorious gang in an El Salvador prison have claimed the lives of at least 14 inmates, an official says.
Presidential Communications Secretary Eugenio Chicas told AFP that the violence erupted on Saturday over an internal dispute involving the Barrio 18 gang in the Quezaltepeque jail in El Salavdor’s capital city of San Salvador.
Chicas further said an official report into the Saturday incident will be published in the coming hours.
On August 19, National Police chief, Mauricio Ramirez, released figures indicating that there were at least 125 murders across the Central American country in only three days.
“These are worrisome numbers. These are Salvadorans who are dying, regardless of who is a gang member or not,” Ramirez added.
Late last month, street gangs in El Salvador killed seven bus drivers for defying their order for public transport strike.
According to latest government data, there have been 3,332 murders between the months of January and June, up from 2,191 in the same period in 2014, .
National data also show that gangs have some 72,000 members operating across the country, and that 13,000 of them are in detention.
El Salvador is one of the most dangerous places in the world, with a homicide rate of 69.2 per 100,000 recorded in 2011, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
A 15-month truce in 2012, involving police, army, the gangs and the government cut the homicide rate by about half, but violence began to rise again after the truce ended in 2014.
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