Mob in northern Guatemala kills eight people, police say
( 2001-07-18 09:18 ) (7 )

One mob killed eight people in remote northern Guatemala after accusing the victims of local highway robberies, police said Tuesday.

The killings took place Sunday in Secoyala, 250 miles (400 kilometers) north of the capital, Guatemala City, said police spokesman Faustino Sanchez.

As authorities sifted through the details of the weekend attack, a group of peasants in another isolated community, the southern city of Tajumulco, took three police officers hostage after they tried to break up a violent territorial feud between locals and residents of a neighboring community.

Trouble in Tajumulco began late Monday night when peasants tilling farmland on the village outskirts clashed with residents from a neighboring hamlet over where to draw the boundary line between the two communities.

Three farmers were severely injured in the fighting which occurred 180 miles (290 kilometers) south of Guatemala City in San Marcos state, said Ricardo Gatica, a spokesman for the local Interior Ministry.

Three police officers who arrived to break up the scuffle were taken hostage at machete-point and forced to drive their pickup truck to the home a local resident after midnight Tuesday.

The standoff ended more than 12 hours later when 170 police officers swarmed into the community and surrounded the home, Gatica said. Authorities in the area remain on red alert following the attack, he said.

Meanwhile, police said Sunday's mob killing began when Secoyala residents captured a 17-year-old boy and proceeded to interrogate and beat him until he named the other suspects responsible for robbing motorists on the highway, said Guatemala's police director, Ennio Rivera.

With the teen-ager's information, the residents searched for the remaining suspects in nearby towns and captured eight people, torturing them and burning them alive, Rivera said. When the police arrived, they discovered the bodies on the outskirts of the town.

The bodies were taken to a hospital 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Secoyala.

Vigilante violence has become relatively commonplace in Guatemala since the December 1996 end of a civil war that pitted leftist, largely Mayan guerrillas against state forces and killed 200,000 Guatemalans.

In March, more than 1,000 people killed a judge and held three police officers and the mayor of an isolated city in northern Guatemala hostage. The group was angry that a local court had freed a man the mob accused of rape.

The Guatemalan office of the United Nations reports that mob attacks claimed 28 victims here last year and killed 100 Guatemalans during the previous two years.