Honduras finds 11th victim in attack by crowd

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080805/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/honduras_armed_dispute;_ylt=Apy2tAEmkG2HzxTpsz9aarG3IxIF

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - The death toll has reached 11 in an attack by an angry mob on the home of a local police official in Honduras.

Angry over a long-simmering land dispute, hundreds of people armed with machetes and guns set fire to the home of police officer Henry Osorto as his family sat down for lunch on Sunday.

Five employees and six of Osorto's family members were killed. The victims were burned, shot and hacked to death with machetes.

Security Ministry spokesman Hector Ivan Mejia originally said 10 were killed, but on Tuesday announced that another body has been found.

Osorto was not home at the time of the attack in Silin, near the Guatemala border. He says the squatters want his land.

... Leftist lawmaker Rafael Alegria, a farm leader himself, initially said the mob was reacting to a group of armed gunmen who arrived in Silin shooting off their firearms. But police said there was no evidence to support that.

About 400 families have lived in Silin since 2000, when they seized a section of 79 acres (32 hectares) of disputed state-owned land where U.S. forces once trained troops from El Salvador and Honduras to fight leftists waging civil wars across Central America.

Sorto's home is on that same section of disputed land. As the only police official in the region, he has often clashed with Silin's squatters.

The farming cooperative is named after an American Jesuit priest, the Rev. James Carney Handley, an alleged leftist rebel who was expelled from Honduras and then killed in 1983 during a rebel skirmish with the Honduran army ...

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g0lZxLWghpdMf25yBcvdSWBEPZswD92BQVS00