Gang members murdered at prison in El Salvador

A presidential spokesman told the AFP news agency that the prison violence was linked to an internal feud between two groups of the Barrio 18 gang.

National data also show that gangs have some 72,000 members operating across the country, and that 13,000 of them are in detention. The El Salvadore Directorate General of Prisons (DGCP) tweeted that murders are “presumed to be an act of purification among gang members”. It was then that a manhunt was launched to trace the missing inmates.

Security agents and riot police found their bodies among some garbage bins, added Chicas, labeling it “a purge”. And the situation is being treated as an emergency, but it is under control.

The gangs emerged in the 1980s in Latino neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

In the year through August 19, about 3,840 homicides had been registered in the Central American country of 6.4 million people, a number just short of the tally for all of 2014.

They arrived in Central America when the United States deported thousands of immigrants who had fled there to escape civil wars that had gripped the region in the late 20th century.

Soldiers of the Reaction Special Forces stand guard near one of the few buses that circulates in El Salvador’s capital city of San Salvador on July 30, 2015, during a transport strike.

El Salvador has one of the highest murder rates in the world, largely as a result of bitter fighting between rival gangs. “Regardless of who is a gang member or not”.