Street kids murdered

last updated 8 January 2015

Tegucigalpa, Honduras

Hundreds of street children and teenagers have been murdered in Honduras in recent years, some of them by police officers, a United Nations official said this week. Asma Jahangir, a senior U.N. human rights investigator, called on the Honduran government to put a stop to the killings. Human rights groups say as many as 1,300 Honduran street children have been murdered in four years of “social cleansing.” Police officers committed 13 percent of the killings, according to activists. Honduran Security Minister Gautama Fonseca said that while drug-peddling street gangs were responsible for most of the murders, 12 police officers had been arrested as a result of the accusations. “They are individual actions, independent of the government,” he said.