By IANS/EFE,
Mexico City : A prison fight in the northern Mexican state of Durango left 23 inmates dead, an official said.
The incident occurred around 7 a.m. Wednesday and officials had to bring in state and federal police and the army to restore order, the state Attorney General’s office spokesman said.
The prison, located about five km from Durango city, the state capital, was the scene of two similar incidents in the past 16 months that left 15 inmates dead.
A disturbance last August at a prison in Gomez Palacio, Durango, left 19 dead.
Durango’s prisons “are low- and medium-security” facilities that were not designed “to hold extremely dangerous inmates”, state Public Safety Secretary Jorge Castillo had said.
The number of inmates linked to organised crime groups in Mexico’s prisons has increased dramatically in the past three years as a result of the federal government’s war against drug cartels.