RELATIVES of inmates ask a police officer for information about their loved ones in front of the penitentiary of Tela, Atlantida department, Honduras, on 21 December 2019, after clashes took place at the jail. AFP

TEGUCIGALPA (AFP) — At least 18 inmates died and 16 were injured in overnight clashes between prisoners in Honduras after fighting erupted at a jail in the northern port town of Tela, prison officials said Saturday.

The National Penitentiary Institute said 17 prisoners had died at the facility and another died in hospital, with local media describing the unrest as gang violence.

It was not clear exactly what sparked the melee at the prison in Tela, about 120 miles (200 kilometres) from Tegucigalpa, the capital of the small Central American country.

A prison spokesperson, Digna Aguilar, said authorities had to enter the area carefully “for fear of being among the victims” because several inmates carried firearms. That slowed the investigation.

The combined national security force known as Fusina said that five 9-millimeter guns, as well as ammunition, had been seized from the inmates.

Prison officials had originally reported only three deaths, but the toll quickly rose. A statement Saturday identified 14 of the dead and 15 wounded by name.

Forensic workers placed the bodies in plastic bags and transported them to the judicial morgue of San Pedro Sula to be autopsied.

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, had ordered the army and the police on Tuesday 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 center, according to Aguilar.

Hernandez announced the crackdown after the killings on December 14 of five members of feared gang Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) by a fellow detainee at the high-security prison in La Tolva, 25 miles east of Tegucigalpa.

That came just a day after Pedro Idelfonso Armas, the warden of El Pozo — the country’s main high-security prison, in the western city of Santa Barbara — was shot dead in the south of the country.

The Ministry of Security had suspended Armas shortly before that amid an investigation into his presence during the October 26 killing by prisoners of Magdaleno Meza, a drug kingpin whose confession and notebooks linked him to a brother of the president, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernandez.

Meza’s account books were entered as evidence in the New York trial of Hernandez, who was subsequently convicted on four counts of drug trafficking. He faces sentencing — possibly for life — in January.

President Hernandez condemned the conviction of his younger brother, saying it was based on “the testimony of confessed assassins.”