Drug hitmen kill Guatemala cops jailed for murder

CUILAPA, Guatemala, Feb 26 (Reuters) Drug hitmen murdered four policeman held at a Guatemalan prison on charges of killing three Salvadoran politicians last week, two attacks underscoring top-level mafia power in Central America.

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

''This was a plan,'' she told Reuters. ''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 yesterday 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.

Salvadoran government spokesman Julio Rank said he was shocked by the latest killings.

''What is worrying is the level of corruption found in the Guatemalan police,'' he said.

HIDING THE TRUTH The slain deputies, Eduardo D'Aubuisson, William Pichinte and Jose Ramon Gonzalez, were all members of El Salvador's conservative ruling ARENA party.

D'Aubuisson was the son of the late Roberto D'Aubuisson, an infamous 1980s death-squad leader during El Salvador's civil war who went on to found ARENA.

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.

In 2003, a Honduran member of the regional parliament was convicted of trafficking several kilos of heroin.

Guatemala's National Civil Police, set up in 1997 in the wake of the country's civil war, has frequently been linked to organized crime.

In 2002 the police anti-narcotics squad was disbanded after agents were found to have stolen tons of confiscated cocaine from a police warehouse.

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.

REUTERS SHB RN1322