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Police officers shot dead in Guatemala cell

Drug hitmen murdered four imprisoned Guatemalan police officers in their cell on Sunday, eliminating key suspects in the grisly killings last week of three Salvadoran politicians, police said.

Sunday's killings were the latest episode in a convoluted murder case that has shaken the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments.

Officers outside the jail in Cuilapa, 70km east of Guatemala City, showed reporters cellphone photos of the bullet ridden bodies of Luis Arturo Herrera, head of the Guatemalan National Police organized crime unit, and three of his officers.

Drug-related

Maria Fernandez, a spokeswoman for the police, said the officers were killed by the same drug cartels believed responsible for ordering the deaths of the politicians.

"This was a plan," Fernandez said. "Planned by the same people who ordered the death of the Salvadorans."

The policemen, including the head of an anti-organized crime squad, were arrested on Thursday for the murders of three deputies from the Guatemala-based Central American parliament and their driver.

The deputies' bodies were found dead in a burned-out car near Guatemala City on Tuesday. Guatemalan officials said their murders were drug related.

Police did not say how the prison killings happened but relatives of prisoners in the Boqueron prison, near the town of Cuilapa, said on the radio that prison guards let attackers enter the jail at visiting time and that shots were heard soon after.

Nor was it certain whether the killings occurred before or during a prison riot. The prison director told reporters inmates were in control of the prison and had taken six prison officials hostage, but human rights officials negotiating with the prisoners said the inmates grabbed the hostages out of fear they would be blamed for the killings. One hostage was released after talks.

Riots

Members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang also rioted in the prison, capturing five prison officials, police said. However, it was unclear if the gang riot started before or after the killings.

The hostages were still being held late on Sunday as about 50 riot police entered the prison.

Guatemala ended a 36-year civil war with peace agreements in 1996, but the country has since been swamped by gang and drug violence and destabilized by police and government corruption.

Both the Guatemalan national police and the Central American parliament have been mired in high level drug-trafficking scandals in recent years.

Opposition politician Otto Perez Molina blamed Sunday's murders on corruption among top level security officials who do not want their links to narco smuggling to be revealed.

"The murder of these policemen, the way it happened, is because they are trying to hide the truth," he said.
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