Tuesday 11 June 2013

Gang killings continue in Honduras in spite of pledge to stop

Although the gangs of Honduras pledged last May to end their violent acts, raising hopes that crime could drop in Honduras as it has in neighbouring El Salvador, recent killings attributed to street gangs indicated they had yet to act on their stated intentions. One recent victim of gang criminality was a 31-year-old man shot on 9 June outside the northern city of San Pedro Sula, after he refused to hand over his house to a gang. Relatives of Cristhian Fajardo Sánchez fled the family home after one of the gangs told them they needed the property, but neighbours were cited as saying that he refused to leave - living there in a state of fear and locking himself in every evening after returning from work in a bottling plant, the Honduran daily La Prensa reported on 10 June. Three gunmen reportedly shot him as he walked to work one morning; witnesses said they were waiting for him at a street corner and shot him as he sought to walk past and ignore them. It was not immediately which of the gangs killed him, as he was reported shot on the frontier of the territories of the Mara Salvatrucha and M-18 gangs. In other incidents: the head of the state electricity firm ENEE for the northern city of Progreso was shot there on 11 June as he sought to enter a taxi, and a 63-old-woman was gunned down in Tegucicalpa on 9 June, apparently while cleaning the Protestant church she attended. The killing was attributed to an execution squad of 12 Maras, and police suspected this may have been for the victim's earlier efforts as head of a residents' association to reopen an abandoned police post in her neighbourhood, La Prensa reported. The daily also reported the shooting deaths of a Guatemalan couple while driving in Choloma in the northern department of Cortés, and of two taxi drivers in San Pedro Sula and Tegucicalpa on 9 June.

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