More than 350 prisoners died in a prison in Honduras

A massive fire has engulfed an overcrowded prison in Honduras, killing more than 350 inmates, many of whom were trapped in their cells, Reuters reported.

A senior official from the attorney general's office, Danielia Ferrer, said 357 people died in the fire that started late Tuesday evening at the Comayagva prison, about 75 km north of the capital Tegucigalpa.

"The scenes are terrible... Our staff went around the cells - the bodies are charred and most of them are unrecognizable," Ferrera told Reuters, adding that authorities would have to use dental records and DNA analysis to identify the victims.

"We couldn't get them out because we didn't have the keys and we couldn't find the guards," said a fire department spokesman.

This was one of the worst prison fires ever recorded in Latin America.

"We heard the screams of people caught in the fire," one of the prisoners told reporters, showing the fingers he broke while escaping the fire. "We had to lift the panels on the roof to get out."

It has not yet been determined whether the fire was caused by riots, which are common in prisons in Honduras, or whether it was an accident.

However, Danijel Orleana, head of the prison system, said there was no riot.

"There are two assumptions - that some prisoner started the fire or that there was a short circuit in the electrical installations," he said.

Worried and angry family members (mostly women) gathered around the prison, and at one point they started throwing stones at the police and trying to forcefully enter the prison, to which the police responded with tear gas and shots in the air.

Honduran President Porfirio Lobo said the director of the prison and the head of the national prison system had been suspended to ensure a thorough investigation.

It is still difficult to determine the exact number of dead, since there are reports that around a hundred prisoners escaped, and that they may have been mistakenly counted among the victims.

More than 850 prisoners stayed in the Komajagva prison, which is much more than the prison's capacity. The local police chief read the names of the 457 survivors who are outside the prison.

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