Honduras News - Daily News about Honduras

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — A leader of a violent kidnapping gang that abducted and killed the son of a former Honduran president was among four inmates who escaped from a prison outside the capital on Tuesday.

The prisoners used makeshift saws to cut through the bars of their cells at the National Penitentiary outside Tegucigalpa. A rainstorm muffled the sound of the escape, but guards may also have been involved, prison director Rafael Castro told reporters.

“These are dangerous fugitives,” he said. “And also 10 guards from the prison are being investigated in the case.”

Among the escaped was 40-year-old Santos Padilla, the sole surviving leader of a feared and violent gang responsible for dozens of abductions and killings in the late 1990s.

The gang, made up of Santos Padilla and his four brothers, kidnapped 25-year-old Ricardo Maduro Andreu as he left his home in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’ second-largest city, in April 1997. The kidnappers opened fire on a vehicle carrying Maduro Andreu and his bodyguard, Henry Rivas. Rivas was killed and the gang grabbed a wounded Maduro Andreu, whose lifeless body was discovered a short time later.

The brothers were convicted of the crime.

Maduro Andreu’s father, Ricardo Maduro, was elected president of Honduras in 2002 and he left office in January. Honduran law prohibits re-election.

Three of the Padilla brothers were killed in May 1998 during a shootout with police in Tegucigalpa. The fourth died a year later in another gunbattle with authorities.

Tuesday’s escape marked the second time Padilla has slipped out of the National Penitentiary. He escaped in 2002 and fled to the United States, where he was captured, extradited back to Honduras and incarcerated anew last year.