Tegucigalpa,
The United Nations, European Union and United States have urged Honduras to investigate the recent deaths of six young women in just four days, including a nurse who died in police custody.
Honduras police said Keyla Martinez, 26, was arrested last Saturday night for violating the coronavirus curfew in La Esperanza in the country’s west, and claimed officers found her in her cell hours later “trying to kill herself.”
The hospital she was brought to said she was dead on arrival, and prosecutors said an autopsy showed Martinez had died from hanging.
But her mother, Norma Rodriguez, told AFP that she is “one hundred percent sure that my daughter was killed.”
“She was murdered in the cells of the National Police, where she should have been protected,” she said, as some 200 family members, friends and supporters of Martinez marched through downtown La Esperanza calling for justice.
The Anticorruption Coalition of civic groups has urged authorities to bring to justice those responsible for her death so that the crime, like “90 percent of murders of women” in Honduras, does not go unpunished.—APP
