US drug enforcement agents shot dead pilot in Honduras US officials say that in late June an agent shot a suspected drug trafficker as he reached for his gun in a holster during a raid in a remote northern part of Honduras. That operation resulted in the seizure of 360 kilograms of cocaine, the officials said. A similar raid on May 11 killed four people, whom locals claimed were innocent civilians travelling a river in Honduras at night. Honduran police said the victims were in a boat that fired on authorities. The DEA said none of its agents fired their guns in that incident. The deaths come amid an aggressive new enforcement strategy that has sharply increased the interception of illegal drug flights in Honduras, which has become a major transshipment point for drugs heading to the United States. The country's remote Mosquitia region is dotted with clandestine airstrips and a vast network of rivers for carrying drugs to the coast. The strategy involves a special team of DEA agents who work with Honduran police to move quickly and pursue suspicious flights, a US official has said. Honduran and US drug agents follow flights they detect of unknown origin and work with non-U.S. contract pilots. While US officials laud the strategy's successes in seizing cocaine and arresting traffickers, it has come under fire from human rights groups. It is quite impressive that the DEA is directly involved in the killing of alleged traffickers in Honduras and as it is a repeating incident it looks like an escalation with a sense of lack of accountability and over stepping their boundaries in Honduras. We are just getting the DEA account of events and it looks like there is no real inquiry," said Alex Main, a senior associate in the Center for Economic and Policy Research. International crackdowns in Mexico and the Caribbean have pushed drug trafficking to Central America, which is now the crossing point for 84 per cent of all US-bound cocaine, according to Joint Task Force-Bravo, a US military installation in Comayagua, Honduras.