At least 18 prisoners were killed and 16 wounded in shooting inside a prison in Honduras on Friday night, Saturday, according to the Prison Administration in a statement.
It was not clear what caused the shooting at Tila Prison, the northwestern coastal city two hundred kilometers from the capital, Tegucigalpa.
The prison administration first reported three deaths, but the toll rose rapidly to 18 dead and 16 wounded.
Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez last Tuesday ordered the police and the army to take full control of 27 prisons in the country in order to counter a wave of assassinations in which they occurred. But as of Friday, the military had not taken control of Tila Prison, according to the spokeswoman for the prison administration.
The president made his decision after the assassination of five members of the "MS13" gang on December 14, by a prisoner in La Tolfa prison, forty kilometers east of the capital.
The day before, Pedro Armas, the director of the El Pozo prison in Santa Barbara, west of the country, was killed.
