300 killed in Honduran prison after inmate 'set fire to mattress' Firemen enter the National Prison of Comayagua where a fire broke out at the facility in Comayagua, 90 kms north of Tegucigalpa (ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP/Getty Images) Some of his cellmates said that he screamed: 'We will all die here!' And in five minutes everything burned," Mr Orellana said. He did not say whether the man had survived. All of the dead were reported to have been inmates with the exception of one woman who is believed to have stayed overnight with a lover and was caught up in the chaos when the fire broke out late on Tuesday. There were also reports that rioting broke out before the fire started and that the fire brigade were shot at as they approached the prison, suggesting that guards may have lost control before the blaze began. The fire was the worst in a prison for at least a decade, far outstripping an incident the Dominican Republic in 2005, when 135 people died in flames that broke out during a fight between gangs. Honduras' capital, Tegucigalpa Josue Garcia, a spokesman for the local fire brigade, said fire fighters encountered "hellish" scenes as they tried to free around 100 prisoners from locked cells. "We couldn't get them out because we didn't have the keys and couldn't find the guards who had them," he said. Many of the bodies recovered from the cells were burnt beyond recognition and could take months to identify. Video footage showed bare-shirted inmates carrying the wounded on their backs as they pushed through the smoke. But after a few minutes, which seemed like an eternity, a guard appeared with keys and let us out," said Silverio Aguilar, a prisoner who said there were 60 men packed into his cell. At least 21 people were being treated in hospital. The chaos continued on Wednesday afternoon as hundreds of relatives of the dead inmates tried to storm the prison to get news of their loved ones. "This is desperate, they won't tell us anything and I think my husband is dead," one woman said as she wept outside the jail. Police and soldiers responded with warning shots and tear gas but at one point fell back under a hail of stones and allowed a crowd of men, women and children to push through the gates of the prison complex. Like many of Honduras's prisons, Comayagua was filled well over capacity, with 800 inmates living in cramped and often violent conditions. In July 2010, President Porfirio Lobo declared an emergency in nine of the country's 24 prisons, which one minister described as "universities of crime." As police cope with the mounting death toll and the grieving families they will face another equally difficult task: tracking down the convicts now on the run.