At least 48 inmates were killed on Tuesday morning in central Honduras after a riot broke out at the country’s only prison for women, one of the deadliest outbreaks of violence in the country’s long-troubled prison system.

Most of the victims had been burned, while others had been shot, said Yuri Mora, a spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office, who added that the death toll was expected to rise as investigators combed through the detention facility in Támara, near Tegucigalpa.

While the cause of the violence was not clear, the prison has been the scene of ongoing conflict between feuding gangs.

“We are dismayed by the loss of human lives,” Julissa Villanueva, vice-minister of security and head of the Honduran penitentiary system, said in a news conference.

The country’s penal system, she said, had been “hijacked” by organised crime.

The death toll on Tuesday makes the episode thedeadliest prison riot in the Central American country in years.

Killings have surged in recent years in the women’s prison, where several inmates have been strangled or stabbed during confrontations between female gang members of two rival criminal organisations: the 18th Street gang and the MS-13 gang.